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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


PRINCETON, N. J. 








PRESENTED BY 


BR 125.892 1925D 

Studdert Kennedy, Geoffrey 
Anketell, 1883-1929. 

The Word and the work 


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THE WORD AND THE WORK 





THE WORD AND 
THE WORK 


/ s 


G.A.STUDDERT KENNEDY,M.A.,M.C. 


Rector of S. Edmund King and Martyr, Lombard Street. 
Chaplain to H.M. The King. 


WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
THE LORD BISHOP OF LONDON 


LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO, 
55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
TORONTO, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS 


1925 


Made in Great Britain 


INTRODUCTION 


Tuts book will make people think. It will give them, to 
use the author’s phrase, “ A pain in the mind.”’ Too many 
of us do not think at all; others do not think deeply 
enough. It is hard to say which is the most irritating : 
the shallow optimist or the shallow pessimist. In Christian 
circles the shallow optimist is the most common. He does 
not really face the tragedies in life, the inequalities in 
human lots, the injustice by which the innocent so often 
suffer for the guilty. 

No one who has been through what the author has been 
through during the War and since can help facing it, and 
the usefulness of this book consists in this: that it shows 
it to be a possibility, even when you have faced everything, 
to keep your faith, tremblingly, but still to keep it in a 
good God. 

“Tn the beginning was the Word ’’—everything is con- 
tained in that sentence, according to the author, who para- 
phrases it thus: “ Right at the heart of the ultimate reality 
there was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world 
without end, a Person expressing a rational purpose which 
man can, in some measure, understand.’’ The whole book 
is a thesis upon this, and, although the opening chapters 
will be found difficult to some, all will understand and 
. appreciate the most moving chapters with which the book 
closes. 


vi INTRODUCTION 


The words of one of our most beautiful Mission hymns : 
“In the Cross, in the Cross, be my glory ever,” 
have rung in my own ears from the Missions which I often 
conducted in earlier days, and these chapters sound the 

refrain again. 

It 7s only in the Cross that we find any answer to the 
sin and suffering of the world, and then only if we proceed 
from gazing at the Cross to taking it up ourselves. The 
book is studded with pieces of poetry. Sometimes they 
are quotations, and sometimes, I think, the author’s own 
creations. These beautiful lines sum up the teaching of 
the sixth chapter : 


“Peace does not mean the end of all our striving, 
Joy does not mean the drying of our tears ; 
Peace is the power that comes to souls arriving 
Up to the light where God Himself appears. 
* * 


* * 
Give me for light the sunshine of Thy sorrow ; 
Give me for shelter the shadow of Thy Cross ; 
Give me to share the glory of to-morrow: 


And gone from my heart is the bitterness of loss.”’ 
[p. 73] 
If the book begins by producing pain in the mind, I 


hope sincerely that it will end by bringing some sort of 
peace to the many to-day terribly tried and troubled by the 
problems which life and death present. 


A. F. LONDON: 
FULHAM PALACE, 


S.W. 


TO THE UNEMPLOYED MEN AND WOMEN 
OF GREAT BRITAIN 
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
WITH SYMPATHY AND RESPECT 


We begin, then, with a conception of reality as existing in many 
grades, each of which finds its own completion or perfect develop- 
ment only in so far as it is possessed or indwelt by that which is 
above it. But we then notice that each depends for its actuality 
upon those which are below it. Matter itself, as experienced by us, 
can be reduced to what is simpler than itself, whether, a, B, or 
particles or still more simply to space-time. Life is unknown except 
from living organisms which are matter informed by life. Mind is 
unknown except in reasonable living organisms. Spirit is unknown 
except in conscientious, reasonable, living organisms. . . . The 
universe will be approached less as a problem (or theorem) in 
geometry, more as a drama or symphony, and as a society in process 
of formation.— WILLIAM TEMPLE (“‘ Christus Veritas ’’). 


CHAPTER I 
In the beginning was the Word.—S. Joun i. tf. 


THERE are no words that have ever been penned by the 
hand of mortal man which contain profounder wisdom 
than the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel. If I ask 
you this Lent to concentrate your thought upon the 
passage, it is not with any idea that we can together reach 
the hidden depths of its meaning, or exhaust its in- 
exhaustible treasures of Truth, but because no honest 
thought about it, after prayer for the ight and guidance 
of the Holy Spirit, can fail to be fruitful of real 
results. 

The opening phrase “‘in the beginning,” carries our 
minds not merely back to the beginning of time, but 
beyond time and space altogether. It lifts us above things 
to the ultimate meaning and value of things. It would 
be better to translate it: ‘‘ Right at the heart of the 
ultimate reality,’ or “ At the back of everything.” The 
word “‘ was ”’ is also timeless, implying a mode of existence 
without beginning and without end, and we could best 
render it by the phrase: ‘“‘ Was in the beginning, is now, 
and ever shall be world without end,”’ by which we strive 
to express eternity. The WORD, whether we take it as 
Greek or Hebrew in origin, cannot mean less than a 
Person expressing a rational purpose which I can, in some 
measure, understand. It is certainly Personal, and the 
idea of a Person who is “‘a word’’ must mean a person 
who expresses a rational idea or purpose in such a way 
that it can be understood by men. Thus if we translate the 
five Greek words as “ Right at the heart of the ultimate 
reality there was in the beginning, 1s now, and ever shall be 

I 


2 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


world without end, a Person expressing a rational purpose 
which men can in some measure understand,” we get nearer 
to the meaning of the words, even though it sound 
cumbrous and queer. 

The old seer warns us that if we are to understand aright 
the sublime story which follows, the story of the Incarnate 
Christ, we must be prepared to go down to the very roots 
of reality. We must take up our stand before the great 
“other than ourselves,” of which we are conscious, the 
world of men and things, and must ask ourselves ‘“‘ What 
does it mean ? ”’ and “* Why does it exist ? ’’ He lays down 
at once the foundation-stone of the Christian faith about 
the universe, which is also the foundation of any rational 
faith that can be held about it whatsoever, Christian or 
non-Christian. He does not begin with Christ, but moves 
by force of rational necessity from Life to the need 
of a meaning for Life, and from that to the meaning of 
Life as revealed to him in the blaze of light that shone in 
the face of Jesus Christ. The world and the life of men 
in the world have a meaning and a purpose. This is 
the great assumption, the initial act of faith, which is at 
once the highest result of thought, and the foundation of 
all thinking. Without it life, in any sense beyond animal 
existence, and thought about life, are impossible. At its 
heart the world is not mad, but sane. The stars above our 
heads, and the stones beneath our feet, are for ever talking, 
and talking sense, sound sense, and not cruel nonsense. 
That is the bare minimum of faith for man. If that goes 
everything goes, and we can neither live nor think about 
life, we can only take a long time to die. It might seem as 
though this assumption were so obviously true as to be 
platitudinous and unimportant. But anyone who thinks 
that must be either very young or exceptionally fortunate. 
Most men and women over thirty have been through times 
when it was by no means obvious. 

I do not know whether any of you who read these 
words have ever been through what I think is one of 
the most searching and terrible experiences this troubled 
life affords. Have you ever had a friend with whom con- 
verse was sheer joy because of his intelligence, sym- 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 3 


pathy, and understanding; a friend with whom speech 
was scarcely a necessity because eye met. eye, and 
smile answered smile, finishing the unfinished sentence, 
answering the unuttered thought, revealing that most 
glorious of all things—an active and reasonable mind ? 
Then have you known the day when your friend “‘ Went 
out of his mind,” as we say? It is a tragic and torturing 
phrase: ‘“‘ He has gone off his head,” “ He is out of his 
mind.’’ No one who has not known it at first-hand can 
appreciate the creeping horror those words convey 
Converse is transformed from pure joy to pure agony 
One comes away, aye runs away, with pity and repulsion 
tearing at one’s heart, and the whole fabric of one’s faith 
in life tottering on its base. There is nothing in life which 
is at once so piteous and repulsive as insanity. Well, 
what the great Teacher says is that we need not, must 
not, feel that horror in our converse and communion 
with the world in which we live. There is reason in it. 
It is not mad. 

But there are now, and I fear there always have been, 
a large number of people who found and find even that 
bare minimum of faith difficult if not impossible to accept. 
I shall never forget an old lady in France who, because 
she could not imagine what life would be like outside the 
village where she had always lived, or conceive of dwelling 
in any other cottage but that which was her home, clung to 
both even when the fighting-line was drawn within a 
mile. She had a little plot of land outside the village, and two 
cows which she used to lead by a cord. We soldiers, if I 
can be called a soldier, had a kindly feeling towards her, 
and used to call her “‘ Madame.”’ Often when the evening 
came we used to see her leading her two cows up the 
village street, and would hail her as she passed. I think 
she valued those jolly deep-throated shouts of “‘ Bon soir, 
Madame.” Men were still men, and there was kindness on 
the earth. Then one day when the village, which up to 
then had escaped bombardment, was heavily shelled, 
Wwe came upon her sitting on the roadside near to her two 
cows which had been literally torn to pieces, wiping 
her wounded face, and crying through her tears: ‘‘ Le bon 


4 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


Dieu, il est mort ! Le bon Dieu, il est mort!” (“ The good 
God’s dead.’’) There is no sense, no meaning in the world ; 
it is mad, it is a dirty, cruel, muddled mess, that grinds 
oe crushes living things to death. That was how it seemed 
to her. 

There we come to it. Right from the Gospel of S. John 
to the soul of a peasant woman in her hour of bitterness. 
So we always come from the deepest Truth to the simplest 
life. Truth which is so lofty that it cannot come 
down to earth is not truth at all, but the product mostly 
of intellectual conceit that loves obscure and twisted 
subtleties. It is from this last and awful darkness that the 
Gospel light is sent to save us. We must cling to that first 
and final act of Faith: ‘“‘In the beginning was the Word.” 
With it we are safe; without it we are damned to the outer 
darkness of despair. If life has never driven us to the very 
edge of that darkness, if we have never known what it 
means to clutch at our faith as a climber clutches at a 
jutting rock or tree-root on the edge of a ravine, with a 
desperate prayer that it may hold, we are among the lucky 
ones in this strange life, and should go softly and with 
grateful hearts, made pitiful because they are at peace. 
Moreover, we should remember constantly that our first 
duty, the only raison d’étre-of our existence, is that 
“ through the tender mercy of our God whereby the day 
spring from on high hath visited us, we may give light to 
them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, 
and guide their feet into the way of Peace.” 

If all that our religion does for us is to save us from the 
great abyss, if we are deaf to the cry of those who are 
reeling over the edge, clinging wildly to some last hope, 
or lying in the depths; if it does not fill us with the 
longing to save others, it is a fraud, it will not last. Life 
will get us yet. “Let him that thinketh he standeth 
take heed lest he fall.’ If you feel no longing to right 
wrongs, to war against injustice and cruelty, to defy 
tyrannies, to abolish ugliness and dirt, look out! You are 
standing on a rotten piece of ground; it will give way 
beneath you when the hour comes, and you will go down. 
No rites, no ceremonies, no soft music and stately ritual 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 5 


will avail to save you. They will go down with you, and 
you will stand by a broken altar with filth upon the fair 
linen cloth and cry in vain for your comfortable Christ. 
I tell you I have been there, and I know. You cannot stop 
at crying: “‘ What shall I do to be saved?’ You must go 
out into the world, crying: ‘‘ What can I do to save? ”’ 

All around you there are men and women who are well- 
nigh desperate. You must learn to hear them cry. They 
do not all speak plainly of their need. They do not know 
what they want. Some curse and swear, some laugh, some 
sneer, some dance defiance of despair; all but the weakest 
wear some pitiful disguise to hide their secret sorrow from 
the mockery of men. If you take men and women as you 
find them, and have no eyes to see them as they are, 
you walk in the world through a land of dreams, and never 
reach reality at all. Whatever else this odd world is, it is 
neither conventional nor commonplace. As usual, extremes 
meet, the cynic who sneers and the theoretical idealist 
who smugly smiles, carry on their warfare in a phantom 
universe that centres round themselves. One gleam of 
God’s reality would lay them both stark dead. 

Three months ago when I landed from America and 
reached Paddington Station one dreary Sunday night, 
I was accosted by a young man, who touched his hat to me, 
and asked if he could carry my bag. The touching of his 
hat made me sick to start with. You see he did not do it 
because he really respected me, or thought me worthy of it. 
He was crawling for a job. That is disgusting. I felt 
ashamed all over. My very bones blushed. There are men 
I love to take off my hat to ; it is a joy to do them reverence. 
If ever the day comes when no man removes his hat to 
another, and is the better for doing it, it will be a bad day 
for mankind. We shall never all be equal except by 
levelling down. Mankind can never be levelled up without 
ceasing to grow, for growth depends, and always has 
depended, largely upon the exceptional individual, the 
personality to whom the rank and file of men look up, 
and whom they delight to honour. We do not lose our 
dignity by honouring the truly honourable. But that was 
not the reason of this hat-touching business; it was 


6 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


crawling, cringing for money. It was servility. I do not 
and did not blame him. Necessity knows no law. But I was 
ashamed, and am ashamed. If any man touches his hat 
to me, not because he respects me, but because necessity 
puts him in my power, he degrades himself and me. Both 
slaves and slave-drivers are an abomination to the Lord. 
If you really like that sort of things your soul is in 
danger. I let him carry my bag, not that I really wanted 
it—I could have carried it myself—but because I 
wanted to talk with him. We went down the street, and 
talked of many things. At last I asked him whether he 
believed in God, or went to a place of worship. There came 
into his face a look which was in itself the most dreadful 
reply to such a question—a grin that was half a sneer, 
and he poured out at me his philosophy of life. It was just 
bitter, naked, disillusioned cynicism. The War and the 
“Peace had finished all that for him. Every man for himself 
and the devil take the hindmost was the truth about life. 
There was no room in the world for Gentle Jesus, and that 
sort of stuff. Here was another for whom the first founda- 
tion act of faith was difficult if not impossible. He did not 
believe that the ultimate reality was reasonable, or that 
there was any meaning in life. Peace—or what we called 
Peace—has as many victims as War, it damns as many 
souls to the outer darkness of despair. It is the task of the 
Christian Church to save them. 

We are often told that the Church has nothing to do with 
social questions ; that there is no social Gospel ; and that we 
should stick to our real business of saving individual souls. 
There is truth in the warning, but in the way it is often 
put it is just the half-truth which is the most dangerous 
sort of lie. It is perfectly true that we must not mistake 
the Kingdom of Comfort for the Kingdom of Christ, and 
suppose that if we could secure adequate wages and decent 
conditions of life for everyone our work would be done, 
but the souls we have to save are incarnate not disembodied 
souls, and there are conditions of life which are soul- 
destroying, not merely because they are painful, but 
because they are essentially degrading, inhuman, and 
wrong. All poverty is not degrading. There is a poverty 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 7 


which, as Christian saints have often shown, can set men 
free, and endow them with real wealth, the wealth of 
joy in simple things. But there is a degrading and des- 
tructive poverty which starves and stunts the human soul 
and makes for death, not fulness of life. Against that the 
Church, if she be true to herself, and true to her Lord, 
must wage ceaseless and unremitting war. 

The poverty of men such as this one whom I met, and 
there are millions of them, is prostitution of the human per- 
sonality. It is a branch of the white slave traffic, and it is 
our duty to stamp it out of the world, not merely by 
rescuing individuals who are compelled to prostitute 
themselves by crawling for employment as this man 
was compelled to do for the sake of his wife and children, 
whom the dole could not keep, but by devoting our- 
selves to the reform of those conditions which force 
him into this position. There are miles and miles of 
our modern cities and villages, too, which in the eyes 
of Christ are as beastly as a brothel, and for the 
same reason, they are the symbol and the sign of wholesale 
traffic in human souls. The miners’ cottages in many of our 
colliery villages tell us, just as plainly as though it were 
printed in great flaming letters on a hoarding, that here are 
“Souls for Sale,’ and you need not bid too high, either ; 
there are plenty of them. Living and working under such 
conditions it is well-nigh impossible for many of them to 
cling to their first act of Faith, and believe that at the heart 
of things there is a Person expressing a reasonable purpose 
that they can in some measure understand. They see no 
evidence of it, and it is difficult to show them any, 
either. 

For my part, when I am tempted to doubt the goodness of 
God, and the essential sanity of the universe, the first 
challenge that I have to meet is the challenge of Beauty— 
the sheer beauty of God’s world. The longer I live the more 
it means to me. It is a perpetual rebuke to the rank 
ingratitude of unbelief. When my soul gives up the fight for 
faith and tries to sneer at life, God hoists again the flags 
of dawn, or blows his trumpet from the hills, and brings 
me humbly back again. 


8 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


Up to these purple hills, O God, 
I lift my longing eyes, 

Thy gaunt and silent sentinels 
Against the sunset skies. 


Their great heads bowed upon their breasts 
Their helmets tipped with flame, 

They stand to guard the mystery 
Of Thy most Holy name. 


All gnarled but empty are their hands, 
They wield nor sword nor spear, 
And yet in trembling reverence 
My stubborn soul draws near. 


Bright blades of beauty are their swords, 
The majesty of years, 

The challenge of eternity 
To tide of time and tears. 


The paltry prizes of my sin 

Show shameful, poor, and mean, 
O mercifully merciless, 

Unclean! I am, Unclean ! 


Christ, Thou white Christ upon the hills, 
I dare not come to Thee, 

I can but beat upon my breast 
And clutch at Calvary. 


It is possible indeed to become sentimental and unreal 
about beauty, possible to compose manifestly artificial 
rhapsodies about the glory of God in the beautiful things 
of the world, but to deny the healing, pleading, and power 
of beauty is to sin against the Holy Ghost, and to give the 
lie to one of the most poignant and positive experiences of 
life. 

So it seems to me. Nor do I believe that I am alone in 
this. Only a very small minority of the human race can 
be called intellectual. There are millions of men and 
women who could not follow an argument beyond its 
simplest stages to save their lives, but almost all men are 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 9 


more or less artistic. Again and again I found in France, 
among he mass of ordinary men whom the bitterness of 
life was driving every day to the very edge of the abyss 
of despair, that what called them back again to their 
vague but valid faith in the final g odness of God was the 
glory of a sunset or a dawn; the colour of some wayside 
flower ; or the laughter in the eyes of a peasant child in the 
village where they went to rest. They needs must love 
the highest when they saw it, and could not withhold their 
tribute of “‘ Well Done ” to God’s accomplishment, and that 
is the root of worship in the soul of man. I believe from the 
bottom of my heart that to the great mass of mankind if 
they are to be healthy and sane, that is, if they are to be 
saved, beauty is as necessary as bread. ‘If you have two 
loaves, sell one and buy a lily,’ says an old Chinese proverb. 
A piece of wisdom that has its roots in the nature of God 
and of man. Seventy-five per cent. of our people are out of 
touch with organized religion, and with the worship of 
God, and one of the chief reasons for this is that our in- 
dustrial civilization blasphemes against the beauty of 
God. We have come to regard Beauty as a luxury for the 
few, and not as an absolute necessity for the many, and 
have cut off millions of our people from their chiefest 
natural means of grace. The cumulative effect of this 
excommunication of the masses is disastrous. The results 
of bad housing, overcrowding, and of the barbarous 
ugliness of our cities are not only ruinous physically and 
morally, but spiritually. They corrupt the souls of men, 
and undermine their faith in the goodness of God. 
Beauty does not lie only in the eyes of the beholder, 
nor only in the thing beheld ; it lies in a subtle sympathy 
and harmony between the two. There is beauty in the 
world because “right at the heart of the ultimate reality 
there was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be a 
Person expressing a rational purpose which mortal man can 
in some measure understand.”’ But the world in which 
multitudes of our people live, the world of dirty, dingy 
streets, gaunt, ungainly factories, and ramshackle hovels run 
up anyhow, reveals no rational purpose of any kind. Itisa 
symbol, not of divine order, but of human, all too human, 
B 


10 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


chaos, a chaos of disordered and unregulated passions, lust of 
power, and lust of gold, pugnacity, vanity, and pride. 
It is not merely outwardly ugly, but inwardly vile. 

It is essentially evil. We comfort ourselves by saying : 
“They are used to it”; and that is true, the most 
terrible truth of all. They do get used to it, reconciled 
to it, reconciled to evil and ugliness, and ready to believe 
that it is the real world. That is the final horror. The most 
dreadful thing about the people of the underworld is their 
content. But, thank God, it is not very deep; there is 
rebellion in a hundred millions souls all over the world 
to-day. East and West, wherever the great machine goes 
out, there are signs of passionate protest against this 
murder of the human soul. The protest is dangerous ; 
it is as terrible as a volcano, it may tear the whole fabric of 
civilisation into ribbons, destroying the good with the 
bad, the true with the false, unless it is guided right. It 
may become a rebellion against God and His Christ, 
unless Christians can make it a rebellion in the name of 
God against the evil and ugliness that blaspheme the 
beauty of His Love. 

If you take this book with you into Church, and kneel 
down in the silence before the altar of God, listen to the 
voice of the world. I always hear it ; it is like the voice of 
the sea, a moaning voice of many waters crying out for 
God. 


Peace we were pledged, yet blood is ever flowing, 
Where on the earth has ever Peace been found ? 
Men do but reap the harvest of their sowing, 
Sadly the songs of human reapers sound. 


Sad as the wind that sweeps across the ocean, 
Telling to earth the sorrow of the sea ; 

“Vain is my strife—just empty, idle motion, 
All that has been is all there is to be.” 


So on the earth the time waves beat and thunder, 
Bearing wrecked hopes upon their heavy breasts ; 

Bits of dead dreams and true hearts torn asunder, 
Flecked with red foam upon their crimson crests. 


THE WORD AND THE WORK II 


Can you hear that voice and still believe in God? Still 
believe that in the beginning was the WORD? Then you 
have got the Truth, go out and tell it, go and live it, go 
out and suffer for it; that is the will of Christ. But if 
your altar is a refuge, if you put your fingers in your ears, 
to shut that awful voice outside ; if you have built a private 
sanctuary for the comfort of your little soul, then look out ! 
It is going to fall on you ; the winds of God are coming to 
blow it all away, and you may cry after it with many 
tears, but it will not come again. It is a nasty mean little 
place, and the wrath of God’s Love will burn and burn and 
burn it until there are not even left the ashes of regret. 


CHAPTER cht 


And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in 
the beginning with God.—S. JOHN i. I and 2. 


AN old Indian teacher used to say : “‘ The dumbness in the 
eyes of animals is more touching than the speech of man, 
but the dumbness in the speech of man is more agonizing 
than the eyes of animals.’”’ Human speech when it aspires 
to express anything beyond the lowest levels of thought 
and feeling is an effort to express the inexpressible. Even 
the speech of our Lord is that ; hence that pathetic cry: 
“ He that hath ears to hear let him hear.” It is at once a 
warning to man, and a prayer to God. The weakness of 
words was one of the woes that went to make up Calvary, 
as it has gone to make the cross of every real poet, prophet, 
preacher, and teacher ever since the world began. The 
shadow of that Cross lies dark upon the glory of S. John. 

“ This person expressing a rational purpose was eternally 
with God, and, indeed, was God, and yet it is truer to say 
that He was with God.” He is face to face with the final 
mystery, and, as usual, words fail him ; he cannot say it. 
He wants to say with all the power of his being that God 
can and must be known, that men can hear and have heard 
Him speak, that our knowledge of God is a reality, the 
greatest and most necessary of realities, here and now 
upon this earth. He wants to protest, and protest with 
passion, against the unknown and unknowable God so dear 
to the natural man, the “‘ Supreme Being,’’ whom everybody 
acknowledges but nobody cares a rap about. Formal and 
consciously formulated atheism is scarcely ever real 
atheism. It is generally the worship of some neglected 

12 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 13 


aspect of God in mistake for the whole of Him. Professing 
atheists are often religious people, protesting against some 
caricature of God which they suppose, or have been taught, 
is His reality. Real atheism, which is either sin or nervous 
disease, may be ready to acknowledge that there must be a 
God, but denies that He is or can be known by man. A 
passionate blasphemer is often as near to the Kingdom of 
God as Saul the persecutor was to Paul the prophet, 
when he witnessed the stoning of Stephen. He blasphemes 
because he half believes. Real atheism denies that the 
Word is God, denies that there is any rational purpose in 
life which men can enter into and understand. 

This denial, if it be persisted in, means the death of the 
human soul. It lies at the root of all sin. For the man who 
denies that life has a purpose of its own there is nothing left 
but to invent a purpose for life. This is what he inevitably 
does. He takes the world and tries to make it serve his 
purpose and submit to his will. Since he cannot know God, 
he worships the only God he can know, which is himself, and 
the inevitable result of this idolatry is disillusion and 
despair, and the greater the man is the more awful is the 
tragedy. The supreme example, perhaps, is Napoleon, 
whose uniquely powerful natural genius enabled him to 
blast, pound, tear, and torture the world in order to shape 
it to his will, only to find that it would not bend, but 
that he must break, and listen at last to the judgment of 
the sea as it cried against the cliffs of S. Helena. The 
world is full of Napoleons, only different because they are 
so puny and so small, scheming, planning, twisting and 
torturing the world in a million futile blundering ways to 
make it serve their little human ends, until their natural 
force abates, and life throws them aside to grumble and to 
die. That is the monotonous miserable story of a million 
million lives, and its constant repetition is the most 
searching challenge to faith in God of which I know. 
A challenge and yet a confirmation, for it does proclaim 
and reproclaim the necessity of God, a God who can be 
known and loved, with whom we can, in however small a 
way, co-operate, becoming in S. Paul’s audacious phrase, 
“ fellow-workers with Him,” and so finding life. 


14 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


The growth of modern knowledge has, in many subtle 
ways, strengthened the temptation to that real atheism 
which denies that God can be known, or the purpose of 
life in any real sense be understood by man. 

Science has revealed to us the vast infinities of space 
and time, and added so much to the immensities of the 
universe that our minds reel back amazed and afraid. 
We cry out, with a new fear that perhaps there is no one 
to hear our cry, “‘ What is man that Thou should’st be 
mindful of him or the Son of Man that Thou should’st 
visit him at all.’’ Moreover, not only has our conception 
of the universe become greater, but life in it has become 
-more complex. Not merely is the individual daunted, 
cowed, and baffled by the gigantic spectacle of nature, 
as science reveals it to him, but he is swallowed up in the 
multitude of our teeming populations, and bewildered by 
the intricate network of human relationships in which he 
must become entangled if he is to live at all. The tempta- 
tion to give it all up as a bad job is tremendous. It comes 
in all sorts of guises. It borrows the raiment of humility, 
and appears as a prophet denouncing human pride. What 
can we ridiculous creatures who crawl about on the surface 
of a minor planet set for a time in the timeless and spaceless 
eternity of things, know about the meaning and purpose 
of creation ? It is only our presumption, and fatuous conceit 
that deceives us into supposing that we know, or can ever 
know, the meaning of it all. Do not common honesty, 
reasonable reverence, and proper humility demand from us 
a frank acknowledgment that it is utterly above and 
beyond us, that we neither know nor can know anything 
as to its ultimate meaning and purpose. 

This attitude, moreover, appeals to the natural sloth which 
is in us all. Sir Almroth Wright has said that “ a pain in the 
mind is the prelude to all discovery,” and it is certain that 
we never think or strive to solve a problem unless it hurts us 
to leave it unsolved, and many of us will not move unless the 
unsolved problem hurts us very badly. We need a pain 
and a very sharp pain, either in the mind or somewhere 
else, before we are willing to face the effort of thought. 
If we can by any means soothe the pain, and, as we Say, 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 15 


“set our minds at rest ’’ without thought, there is for all 
of us a strong temptation to do it. Of course, thinking, 
praying, and seeking are great joys—the greatest of joys 
—to some men and women, just as climbing mountains, 
swimming channels, rowing races are joys to many; but 
even they must either keep themse ves in constant training, 
or find a stimulus to drive them to the effort. If, in 
addition to this great advantage of peace without pain, 
agnosticism affords us the satisfaction of conscious 
superiority over those who are fools enough to assert that 
God can be known, and we can have the pleasure of dis- 
playing our deeper wisdom, the cycle of its powerful 
attractions is complete. 

Come unto me, says the Unknown and Unknowable 
God, and I will give you rest, sleep, and entire self- 
satisfaction. What more could any man want? And 
yet we do want more. We want life and love, and power 
to heal the wounds of our humanity. And these the 
Unknown God has not to give. If we can shut our ears to 
the voice of mankind, and remain blind to their signals 
of distress ; if we can content ourselves with the book of 
life before us, written in a language which we cannot read, 
and make no attempt to learn the language, we may 
indeed die gracefully and harmlessly, but we cannot hope 
to live. For my part I cannot do it. 


I want to live, live out, not wobble through 

My life somehow, then out into the dark, 

I must have God. This life’s too dull without, 
Too dull for ought but suicide. What’s Man 

To live for ealse ? I’d murder someone just 

To see red blood. I’d drink my self blind drunk 
And see blue snakes, if I could not look up 

To see blue skies, and hear God speaking through 
The silence of the stars. 


You might not, gentle reader, be so base as that. You 
may be much more civilized, and it may seem to you to be 
extravagant, but I am a primitive, vulgar man, and I 
would take either to drink, sensuality, or crude personal 


16 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


ambition. You, perhaps, would be content with more 
refined and decent drugs, modern novels, problem plays, 
scandal, bridge, mild gambling, and all the proper apparatus 
we clever people use to dull the pain of boredom, and the 
emptiness of life. You would not murder any one, but 
you might crush to see a murderer tried for his life, or help 
to absorb the ocean of evening papers which enable us to 
enjoy a murder without the blood and tears. I would 
want the blood and tears, the other turns me sick. I 
cannot stand the civilized methods of being savage. 
Savagery or sanctity I could do with, but from the modern 
cave man with his morbid and dishonest sensuality may 
the Good Lord deliver me. I must have God, a God whom 
I can know, and love, and live for, I must find a meaning 
for life. 

If I am to do that I must think. How does one begin. 
Well, it begins with trouble in the mind. We have seen 
that. There is no thought without tears. “‘ Blessed are 
they that morun.”’ “ The sacrifice of God is a troubled — 
spirit.’’ The modern cult of cheeriness is largely due to the 
fact that we are deadly afraid of being sad. We want Easter 
without Lent. But we cannot have it. The human mind, 
and the human heart—and you cannot separate the one 
from the other—God has joined them together and no man 
can put them asunder. 


There’s no such thing as thought which does not feel, 
If it be real thought, and not thought’s ghost 

All pale and sicklied o’er with dead conventions, e 
Abstract truth, which is a lie upon this 

Living, loving, suffering Truth which pleads 

And pulses in my very veins. The blue 

Blood of all beauty and the breath of life itself. 


The human mind and the human heart move to truth 
through trouble. It does not really matter what sort of 
truth you seek. Bunyan faced with the problem of the 
soul, and Newton faced with the problem of the stars, 
are both alike in this; they are troubled spirits. They 
brood over a mass of apparently unconnected, unrelated, 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 17 


and meaningless facts. Bunyan mutters, ‘“ There is no 
health in me’’; Newton mutters, “‘ There is no sense in 
them.”’ For both it is dark, and they do not know the way. 
Both walk at times into the dungeon of despair. The 
pilgrim’s progress of the scientist and of the saint is made 
along much the same road, and it begins with a troubled 
brooding, and a heavy burden at the back of the heart 
and mind. We must all start there. Life begins in Lent. 
But there comes to both a supreme and splendid moment, 
the moment when they cry, “I see! I see!” Bunyan 
sees a Cross and a Man who hangs in agony upon it. 
Newton sees an apple falling to the ground. But into the 
mind of both there comes a blaze of light. For the scientist 
it is the formation of a great hypothesis, for the saint 
it is the vision of a Saviour. But the difference between 
those two great events is not so wide as many would 
suppose. They are but two different ways in which the 
WORD, the Person eternally expressing a reasonable 
purpose, reveals himself to the heart and mind of man. 
For both the scientist and the saint it means the coming 
of order into chaos. It is the perception of sense in 
what had been nonsense, of reason in what had seemed 
mad. 

For both, there remains the task of walking in the light, 
which they have seen. The scientist must apply and 
verify his hypothesis, the saint must work out his own 
salvation with fear and trembling. From the purely 
intellectual point of view, if there were such a thing in any 
but abstract questions, such as those with which pure 
science is concerned, from the purely intellectual point of 
view our faith is the great hypothesis, and our intellectual 
right to hold it is the same as that of the scientist to work 
upon and verify his hypothesis. It is impossible to 
exaggerate the importance of hypotheses to thought. They 
are the bones of science. There is no science until there is 
an hypothesis, a great assumption, on its trial; there is 
no science and no life, either. Thought and life must both 
begin with an act of faith. Both are born from that great 
moment in the pilgrim life, when a man cries out, “ I see.” 
The full meaning and application of what they see, the 


18 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


extension of their vision until it covers all the facts and 
gives a meaning to them, is in both cases the work of a 
lifetime. As they work new vision comes, and they may 
perceive that their first vision was not clear, that 
there is more to learn, and they must modify their early 
faith. 

Religious people often scoff at the scientist because 
they say he is always changing his faith, and scientific 
people scoff at the religious because they never change 
theirs. Neither taunt is really true. It is not true that 
because Einstein modifies Newton therefore Newton did 
not see a great Truth, or that because the Darwinian 
hypothesis of natural selection has been found inadequate 
that therefore it is not true in essence. Nor is it true that 
religious people never change or modify their faith, they 
are always doing it, that is the work of the theologians. 
S. Augustine and Bishop Gore have both seen Christ, but 
what they have seen in Christ is as different in many 
ways as the tropics from the poles. 

The Christian does not claim to know God in all the truth 
of His infinite Being, the claim would be manifestly absurd. 
Omnia abeunt in mysterium. There are depths of Truth 
which lie beyond us, and we bow in humility before the 
“mysterium tremendum”’ of the Father. The cheerful 
pantheism which is, or claims to be, on intimate and 
familiar terms with God, which is, so to speak, hail fellow 
well met with Him; the religion which does not kneel, 
but presumes on Love revealed in Christ, to treat God 
almost as an equal, is a dangerous travesty of Truth. It is 
a reaction from the opposite danger of the unknown and 
unknowable God before whose veiled face men have bowed 
down in fear and trembling, placating Him with servile 
prayers, and propitiating His irrational wrath with morbid 
sacrifices, and it is as far from truth as most reactions are. 

The Christian claim ts that God 1s unknown tn the Infinity 
of the Father, well-known in the Incarnation of the Son, 
and infinitely knowable by the operation of the Spirit. 
We do not claim to know God face to face, and in His 
fulness; but we do claim, and claim emphatically, that 
through Jesus Christ, we are growing in true knowledge 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 19 


of Him. We do claim that whatever new knowledge of 
God comes to us, either as a race or as individuals, whether 
it comes through science or through history, will never 
contradict Christ. In Christ the meaning of Life is being 
revealed. We only see things truly as we see them all in 
Him. His will and His purpose are the will and the purpose 
of all things, and only as we use all things in accordance 
with His will, and for His purpose, do we use them rightly. 
His purpose and not our purposes. His will and not our 
wills. That is the essential point. If we try to take the 
world and mould it to our wills, and make it conform to our 
purposes, it will break us in pieces. It will break our 
hearts, and burst our brains. The world is not yours— 
but God’s; it is not made to serve your purpose but to 
serve the purpose of God revealed in Christ. 

That is the very essence of the Christian faith. That is 
the awful truth which we proclaim in the dogma of the 
Divinity or Deity of Christ. The reason why we reject, 
and must reject, the conception of the merely human 
Jesus, even though he be acknowledged as the greatest of 
all teachers, is because, if that be true, we are still without 
light upon the ultimate meaning and purpose of life and of 
the world in which we live. We have a system of ethics 
but not a religion, a moral code but not a vital faith. 
We cannot be saved by a moral code. We can only be saved 
as we learn to live in accordance with our real environment, 
like any other living creature. There is no escape from the 
everlasting law of selection. We must either correspond 
with our environment or perish, and unless we can know 
the true nature of our environment we cannot correspond 
to it. If Christ does not reveal to us the nature of reality 
we must find someone who does. If the Christian values are 
not the true values, we must discover what the true values 
are, or we cannot live. Our supreme hypothesis is that in 
Christ we have revealed to us the ultimate nature of our 
environment, the true meaning, value and purpose of 
life, and we cannot abandon it unless, and until we find 
a better one. 

A great psychologist, Dr. Hadfield, recently expressed a 
doubt as to whether Christianity was the final religion. 


20 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


If by that he means to question whether Christ as we see 
Him now, and as we interpret Him now, is the final Christ, 
I am sure that he is right ; but if he means that we shall 
ever discover Goodness, Beauty, and Truth which con- 
tradict the Goodness, Beauty, and Truth revealed in that 
Life and Death, I am sure he is wrong. 

I am convinced that, as through evolution in time, the 
true nature and meaning of the world in which we live is 
progressively revealed to us, so tt will become more and 
more evident that we can only live in tt as we conform to 
the Christian standard, and attain to the Christian virtues. 
God leads us to Christ not only through teachers, preachers, 
and prophets, but through life and through history. If 
the coming of the Kingdom of God depended solely upon 
the moral leaders of mankind, I would despair of it ; but 
the purpose of God revealed in Christ is being worked out 
in the world, and in the history of the world. 

We are being led to the Truth through the continual 
pressure upon us of our environment, which has inherent 
an it the purpose of God. The doctrine of the “ survival 
of the fittest,’’ adequately interpreted and properly 
understood, is ultimate truth. The “ fittest’? means those 
who most completely fit in with and correspond to their 
environment. But the ultimate environment of man is 
God “in Whom we live, and move, and have our being.” 
Those, therefore, are “‘ the fittest,’’ and those alone can in 
the end survive, who fit in with, are in communion with, 
God. ‘This is eternal life to know Thee, the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.”’ 

The doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which was put 
forward merely as a bald summary statement of ascertained 
fact, namely, that those animals tended to survive and pro- 
pagate their species most plentifully which were best 
adapted to their material surroundings, has been used to 
lend the authority of “science” to the most perverse and 
ignorantly conceived philosophic ideas. It has been used 
to interpret human life in terms of animal life, and to depict 
the world as being in its ultimate nature a brutal battlefield. 
This teaching it is to which Chrsitianity is utterly and 
irrevocably opposed. The ultimate nature of the world was 


THE WORD AND THE WORK ai 


revealed to man in Christ as being, not a battlefield, but a. 
home, and its final law as being, not the law of the jungle, 
but the law of the family. 

Let us be quite clear about the importance of that 
Truth. Once men really grasp the meaning of it, it will 
turn the world upside down or, rather, right way up. It 
means that if we try to use the material world as though 
it belonged to us, to use as we think fit, to serve our will, 
every single blessing in tt will become a curse. From that 
terrible fact there is no escape for us either as individuals 
or as societies. No intellectual brilliance, or perfection of 
organization, no human scheming, however subtle, can 
enable us to subdue the world of things to our human will. 
We may appear to succeed for a while, but in the end we 
must fail and fail disastrously. We must fail because 
“right at the heart of the ultimate reality there was in the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be a person expressing a 
rational purpose which we can understand,” and it is this 
purpose which finally controls and determines our destiny 
because its nature is divine. We cannot know God in 
His fulness but He has spoken, and is speaking, and 
revealing to us the meaning of the world in which we 
live, and only as we learn to hear Him speak, and to obey 
His will, can we attain to life in any real sense at all, 
There is no such thing as success outside the will of God, 
either for individuals or societies. 

There is no failure so ghastly as selfish and merely 
personal success. Whether it be the success of the business- 
man who gains riches and misses wealth, the success of the 
man in the street who wins pleasure and loses happiness, of 
the statesman who attains to power but fails to serve, of the 
beautiful woman who is universally admired but never 
loved—it is all failure, ugly, vulgar, piteous failure that 
makes not only angels, but decent human beings weep. 
And it is the same with nations. The weakness of the 
world to-day is in the Great Powers. The main reason of its 
poverty is its apparent wealth. Its success is its supremest 
failure. It has succeeded in finding the right means to 
attain the wrong ends. It is in the dark, and has lost its 
way. And yet there is light, and it grows brighter. The 


22 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never 
overpowered it. The purpose and the true value of life are 
being progressively revealed in Christ, and as we patiently 
strive to find the meaning of our many-sided complex 
world in Him, there comes order out of chaos, sense out of 
nonsense, sanity out of madness. 

If we will patiently brood over the tangled, confused, 
and tragic maze of facts which make up human history 
and experience, there will come the moment when we 
cry, ‘‘ I see,’ and there will swim into our vision the master 
fact of Christ. We shall progressively perceive that He is the 
door by which we enter into the palace of Truth, as we faith- 
fully apply the great hypothesis to the problems, personal 
and social, that baffle and perplex us. But we must apply it 
boldly and universally, we must not allow any part of our 
lives to remain unexamined and uncriticised in the light of it. 
The very essence of the hypothesis is in its universality, 
it either applies to everything or to nothing. If we apply 
it only to certain sections or departments of life we do not 
apply it at all. ‘Now are we the children of God, it does 
not yet appear what we shall be—but we know that when 
He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him 
as He is.’ God has spoken and is speaking, and though His 
WORD does not reveal the whole of His infinite Mind, 
yet He is Truth ; and as we apply and act upon the Truth 
we have, we gain more and more, until at last we come to 
know even as we are known. This is the Christian Faith. 


Since so it is, and in that face for me, 
The final beauty burns to birth, 

And all things fair in heaven and earth 
Are summed and centred in a mystery 
Of Loveliness 

Beyond compare, 

How could my soul do less 

Than worship Him as Saviour and as God ! 
Dim though my vision be 

Yet that faint gleam my faith can see, 
Of Christ, is brighter than the sun, 
Without it all the world is bare © 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 


And barren as a winter's day, 
Whose cold grey 

Hours run, 

From dark to dark, 

Without a dawn or sunset sky 

To tell the Truth that Love is there 
Through all. 

Without it pleasures fade and fall, 
As petals from a rotting rose, 

To leave the thorns behind ; 
Without it I am blind, 

And, through a wilderness of woes, 
Go blindly blundering on to death, 
And nothingness at last, 

Which is damnation of the soul. 


23 


CHAPTER IiIl 


All things through Him came into being, and apart from Him not a 
single thing came into being which is of the nature of reality. 
, S. JOHN i. 3. 


THE statement of the great Christian hypothesis of life 
proceeds with a further vigorous emphasis upon its 
universality. Nothing which is of the nature of reality les 
outside its scope, absolutely nothing. Everything which 
claims to possess significance or reality apart from the 
eternal purpose of God expressed in Christ is an imposture 
and a lie. In Him, and in Him alone, all things consist, 
as S. Paul puts it. 

It is precisely to this universal claim of the Christian 
faith, that our modern way of thought and life is most 
obviously opposed. There are few who would not allow 
that religion ought to play a part in life, but most men 
would deny that it is meant to dominate the whole of it. 
Yet it destroys the very nature of religion to make it a 
department of life and thought. Religion is, from the 
intellectual point of view, an hypothesis as to the meaning 
of the whole universe, and from the moral and spiritual point 
of view a life based in every department of it upon that 
hypothesis. We cannot divide the world into departments 
without dividing ourselves, and to divide the human 
personality is to destroy it. That is what we are doing. 
Destroying our souls by dividing our lives, and it is from 
that destruction that our religion ought to save us. 

There are many reasons why this division of life into 
watertight compartments is a specially strong temptation to 
us in these latter days. It is a tragedy which arises directly 
from a triumph. There has been a modern triumph, 


24 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 25 


and it is shallow thinking to belittle or deny it. The 
great and unparalleled advance of Science in the last 
century is one of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring 
events in human history. It is all very well for Disraeli 
to sneer at it, but his sneer is a judgment upon himself, 
rather than upon the great revolution in human affairs 
which he was blind enough to despise. The invention 
of the steam locomotive and the coming into the world 
of mechanical power, was probably the most epoch- 
making event in time,-if we except the emergence of mind 
from matter, and the birth of Jesus Christ. It is as an event 
of enormous moral and spiritual significance, and the. 
tragedy of our times lies in the fact that we have not 
realized that significance in Christ, andas part of the eternal 
purpose of God. 

We have regarded it as what we call a purely secular 
event. No one would deny its immense importance from 
the economic, industrial, political, and social standpoint, 
but what on earth has it got to do with God or with 
religion ? That is the typical outlook of the modern mind, 
all divided up into sections which are never joined into a 
whole. God made mountains, stars, and rivers, but man 
made machines. God made the country, man made the 
town. We divide the world between us, God and I, which 
often means in practice I and God. There is the horror of 
it, it is such rank impertinence, such ridiculous and in- 
sufferable pride, all the more insufferable because it is 
mostly unconscious. Let us frankly acknowledge that it 
has arisen partly in consequence of the power of false 
religion. Science had to fight religion for the right to seek 
after Truth. It has its saints and martyrs from Galileo 
downwards. They are every whit as much God’s Saints 
and Martyrs as S. Stephen or S. Paul. The spectacle of 
Galileo sitting up in prison repeating the seven penitential 
Psalms, because he dared to differ from Moses and the 
theologians, and of poor Descartes burning his book ‘‘ On 
the World” in case he got into trouble too, must have 
made the angels weep, if it did not make them laugh. 

That nonsense was also the result of pride. Men suffered 
from what Hilary of Tours calls “‘irreligiosa solicitudo 

Cc 


26 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


pro Deo,” a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for 
Him. They had to protect God’s Truth because He could 
not look after it Himself. We still suffer from that form of 
pride and of fear. There are still men who would persecute 
their political and theological opponents if they could. 

But the modern form of pride, which finds expression in 
secularism, and the division of life into departments, has 
other roots as well as that of opposition to ignorance and 
superstition. It arises partly from the nature of the 
scientific method itself, which, as the field of human know- 
ledge widens, makes more and more specialized study 
inevitable, and so tends to produce a specialized mind, 
blind to certain aspects of the truth, and is, moreover, in 
itself a method of abstraction, taking a group of phenomena 
out of their setting in reality, and examining them apart 
from their intricate relations to the rest of .the universe. 
Thus the science of anatomy is bound to treat the human 
body apart from the mind, as a thing in itself, although a 
body apart from a mind of some sort is nothing but a 
potential mass of putrefaction. But still more the curse of 
pride is due to the fact that the men who made the great 
discoveries, and, under God, bestowed upon mankind the 
mighty powers of which he is possessed, were not the men 
who used them, nor had they power to decree the purposes 
for which they should be used. 

It is often said, and still more often assumed in thought, 
that man has conquered nature and subdued her to his 
will. But the great men to whom we owe our present 
powers know how false a way of thinking this is. Man 
has not conquered, he has learned to obey. Those who have 
been trained to divest their minds of pride and prejudice, 
and with untiring and persistent patience to watch, to 
ponder, and observe, striving to see things always as they 
are, in order to discover the law of their being, retain a 
wholesome awe and reverence for the great objective 
reality that faces them. They know that what they must 
attain to is not conquest but communion, they seek not to 
subdue but to understand and obey. Einstein has said of 
Max Planck, the physicist: ‘‘ The emotional condition 
which fits him for his task is akin to that of a devotee or a 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 27 
\ 


lover.”” The very essence of a truly scientific mind is not 
pride of power but a passionate humility. Pride and cock- 
sureness are characteristic, not of the scientist, but of the 
hack thinkers, teachers, and traders who impart or assist 
in exploiting the discoveries of other men greater than 
themselves. It is to this host of lesser minds and 
meaner souls that we chiefly owe our modern secularism, 
They swarm like vultures round any new gift God bestows 
upon mankind, seeing in it only power for themselves. 
They have no reverence or respect for nature. They have 
only one question to ask about any fresh discovery: 
“ Will it pay ? Is there money in it ?”’ They do not think 
of the new gift as a gift given fora purpose to mankind, 
they regard it as a lucky chance that has happened for 
themselves. That is the deadly danger of scientific advance. 
It takes a fine mind to make a discovery, but any fool, or 
cunning knave, can use it for his own ends. Thus Prof. 
Soddy talks with justice of “‘ The treatment habitually 
accorded in this country to the poor discoverer, and 
inventor, preyed upon by rascals of every description 
who flourish under the protective majesty of the law, 
and in the grip of a commercialism that deems it the 
highest wisdom not to pay for anything it can get by any 
other means! 

It is to this host of primitive and animal-minded ex- 
ploiters that we mainly owe our modern secular world, 
which claims for itself significance and reality, outside of 
and apart from the purpose of God in Christ, and proclaims 
for itself a law which contradicts the moral law. It is to 
them we owe the fact that the century of science thought 
mainly in terms of Will, and of material power, rather than 
in terms of Truth. Men were, and are still, drunk with power. 
They thought of the world as a dead material thing which 
they could mould and fashion into any shape they pleased. 
They did not perceive any worthy purpose in life; they 
were too intent on making it serve their own shortsighted 
and instinctive purposes. They only wanted to use things, 
and not to worry about what was their proper use. 
Utilitarianism was their characteristic mode of thought. 
They did not ask themselves so much ‘‘ What does this 


28 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


mean?” as ‘‘ What use is it to me? ’’ Man was the measure 
of all things. 

Religious people, for the most part, assented to 
the spirit of their time, allowing their religion to become 
divorced from everyday life, and failing to find any religious 
significance in the vast revolution taking place before their 
eyes. To them also this was obviously man’s doing, not 
God’s. It was a purely secular business without any bearing 
on the spiritual life of man. The results of this essentially 
irreligious and unthinking attitude, which still persists 
and is powerful to-day, have been literally disastrous. 
It has meant that every fresh blessing from God has been 
turned into a curse, and every new power has become a 
source of weakness. The machine has become a master 
rather than a servant. It is not machines that serve men, 
but millions of men that serve machines, and become 
themselves mechanical. The whole world has grown into a 
mechanical device which runs or fails to run according to 
laws of its own—and whether it runs or fails to run, 
grinds out misery for millions. It went on grinding faster 
and faster until it reached a ghastly climax, and we stood 
and looked upon the crowning blasphemy, a great modern 
gun in action, discharging poison gas; a monster embodying 
within itself a whole century of exact and beautiful know- 
ledge, and using it for a purpose that would make a decent 
savage blush with shame, while from the altars on both sides 
passionate prayers went up to a tribal God of War for 
victory in arms. It is a shameful memory. Shameful not 
merely because it was barbarous, but because it was 
blasphemous, a denial of the omnipresence of God, a 
rejection of the great hypothesis, “Through Him all 
things came into being and apart from Him not a single 
thing came into being which is of the nature of reality.” 
It is as though we had tied Christ to our cursed gunsand | 
made him look on while we butchered and dishonoured his 
children. It is this denial of Christ which is shouted at us 
from every corner of our modern world. Everywhere we 
are surrounded by the sacraments of our sin, the outward and 
visible signs of our inward and spiritual disgrace. God 
gave us stones wherewith to build the new Jerusalem, and 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 29 


we turned out Glasgow, Birmingham, Calcutta, and Tokio. 
Those who have knowledge can understand what those 
names stand for in terms of human souls. 

And yet that is not the whole picture, thank God, if it were, 
I could not believe that there was a God to thank. God is 
not mocked. His Will works on, in spite of all, His purpose 
still prevails. The purpose which is immanent and inherent 
in the great new powers is being wrought out. Those who 
have eyes to see can see it, and the first need of our timeis 
for seers, men and women with vision. God has overruled 
our folly. and made even the wrath of man to serve Him. He 
has flatly contrdicted our plans, and destroyed our purposes, 
making them serve His own. The mills of God grind 
slowly, but they grind exceeding small. The work of 
countless millions of men trying to use God’s gifts to serve 
themselves, and make themselves independent and self- 
sufficient, independent of God and of their fellow-men ; 
the ideal of independent individuals, independent classes, 
independent sovereign nations, which was the dominant 
ideal of the age of change, has been overruled and has 
produced a world in which independence is revealed, as 
being not merely a philosophical absurdity, but a practical 
impossibility, a world in which interdependence, universal 
interdependence, is the most obvious and self-evident 
fact of life. Thus the essential nature of the world in which 
we live, has, in spite of our blundering, our blindness, and our 
sin, progressively revealed itself in time, and it is made 
plain that we cannot live in it unless we conform to the 
Christian standard, and attain to the Christian virtues. 
The new environment, which is the due development of the 
old, but is nevertheless new, unparalleled and unprecedented 
in the history of man, demands imperatively as a response, 
that new life which came into the world with Jesus Christ. 

We did not propose for ourselves this new creation, we 
never intended it, so far as we intended anything, it was 
the exact opposite we sought, and are still seeking ; but 
there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how 
we will, and God has made of the world one body, which, 
if it is to live at all, must learn to live exactly in the manner 
in which S. Paul describes the life of the Church “ closely 


30 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


joined and knit together by the contact of every part 
with the source of its life, deriving its power to grow in 
proportion to the vigour of each individual part ; and so 
being built up in a spirit of Love.” 

There are just two alternatives that face the 
world to-day, either that life or agony and death. 
The enormous increase in population, and the conquest 
of space and time by increased rapidity of com- 
munication, both of which are only rendered possible 
by a continual division and subdivision of labour, have 
locked and bound us all into a material unity of universal 
interdependence from which we cannot escape, and which 
we must therefore either acknowledge and respond to in 
spirit or perish. | Our environment constitutes a self 
evident moral and spiritual challenge. We must either adapt 
ourselves to this intensely complex and delicate network of 
human relationships, which our environment imposes upon 
us as a necessity, or face the perpetual and inevitable 
alternative of death, which has faced all living things ever 
since the world began. That is no “ high falutin ” extrava- 
gant theory, but the plainest and most indisputable fact 
in the world of to-day. It is the Lord’s doing and is 
marvellous in the eyes of those who see. Once more we 
return to the prophetic view of life, and see it all as a 
matter of life and death, a crisis, a great choice which we 
must make now or never. And this choice comes to every 
individual soul, and his salvation here and hereafter depends 
upon how he answers to the call. The fate of the world 
depends upon the social responsibility of the individual, 
and his power and willingness to bear tt. It is in form 
and content a social responsibility, arising out of the new 
relationship with our fellow-men and women into which 
the working out of God’s purpose has brought us, but it can 
only be borne by individuals in the last analysis. Corporate 
action we must take, but right corporate action cannot be 
taken except as individuals hear the call and answer, acting 
as personalities responsible to God for their actions. The 
question of all questions is whether the ordinary invididual 
man can bear the enormous burden of personal respon- 
sibility which the new world imposes upon him. At present 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 3I 


it seems impossible. The ordinary man is bewildered and 
perplexed, trying to shift and shirk the responsibility, and 
to put his trust in mass movements and organizations. 
Mass movement and organization we must have; those 
who despise and decry them are mostly people who do not 
want to bear the moral responsibilities which they impose 
upon them, but desire what they call freedom, power to 
express themselves, independence of this crawling crowding 
mass of humanity, which they gratuitously assume is 
inferior to themselves. If they are clever enough, and 
forceful enough, they can still gain for themselves, and 
maintain under the protection of the law, a certain measure 
of this freedom, living in the world as 1f 1t were made for 
their special benefit, but their lives are a living, or, rather, 
rapidly dying lie. 

The outcry against organization and rational regulation 
of our corporate life is largely the refuge of moral cowards 
from the insistent call of God. But mass movement and 
organization can themselves be used as a refuge from that 
call, they can be used to save the individual from the 
painful duties of thought and righteous action, and, when 
they are so used, they constitute the most terrible menace 
to which we are exposed. When an organization or mass 
movement becomes an end in itself, and mere loyalty to it 
is regarded as the highest duty, whether it be a nation, 
a class, a party, or a Church the result is the moral and 
spiritual degradation of the individual soul. Churches, 
nations, classes, parties, unions of a hundred different 
kinds, are necessary and inevitable, it is worse than useless 
to object to them, but they will be good or bad, con- 
structive or destructive, exactly in proportion as they 
increase or decrease the sense of personal responsibility in 
the hearts and minds of the individuals composing them. 
The fate of a complex civilization ultimately depends upon 
the mental and moral quality of the individuals who bear it. 

It is, therefore, not merely necessary that we should be 
as good, individually, as our fathers; we must be very 
much better. Advancing civilization with every step of 
progress makes greater and greater mental and moral 
demands upon its bearers. This is the will of God, the 


32 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


method, a stern and terrible method, by which He educates 
His children. 

There are many who declare that the method is not 
divine but devilish, that it is a scandalously cruel and 
manifestly ineffective method to which man has no power 
to respond. They regard civilization, and its moral com- 
plexity, as a curse, an invention of the devil, or the result of 
accident, which will inevitably collapse, leaving men to 
return to the simple life which they are really capable of 
living. To them modern problems, politics, industry, 
economics, are purely secular still, they have nothing to do 
with pure religion, and the simple Gospel of eternal life. 
They do not want them brought into Church or into 
prayers ; they want to have one place upon earth where 
they will never hear a word about war, wages, housing, 
unemployment, and all the rest of it. They have my 
sympathy, but it will not do. It is only another way of 
evading responsibility, and refusing the call of God to come 
up higher. The religion they want would not be religion at. 
all ; it would be a species of entertainment and relaxation. 
That is, what much of our religion is, a substitute for the 
picture-show. We come because we like the service, the 
music, the preacher, the atmosphere of the place. It 
soothes us with its sanctity and enables us to sleep and 
dream. But this is not religion. These churches are not 
churches, they are little herds of like-minded people 
snuggling up to one another for comfort and warmth 
as animals do. They have their yelps and yowls just like 
the beasts, their party shibboleths, and common cant, 
but the life of God is not in them—the mark of the beast 
is upon them. Their unity does not depend upon their 
response to the call of God, but upon the primitive instinct 
of the herd, whereby birds of a feather flock together— 
Protestant birds and Catholic birds, High Church, Low 
Church, Free Church birds, but all birds obeying an impulse, ~ 
not men that hear a call. The world is full of flocks and 
herds, but what it needs is a society, and a society only 
exists as every member of it is consciously and in- 
telligently responsive to the call of a higher purpose, 
and obedient to a higher Will. 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 33 


It is this universal Society which the environment of 
modern civilization presses upon us perpetually as an 
imperative necessity, as the only way by which we can 
attain that harmony with our environment which 1s life. 
God calls us through His gifts to follow the more excellent 
way of Love, which is the only way of Life. The very 
essence of religion is to give to these new relationships their 
true moral and spiritual meaning, to link up our daily 
work with our daily worship, our common duties with our 
common faith. Civilization demands the Christian virtues, 
and cannot continue to exist without a greater and greater 
measure of them in every individual man and woman. It is 
instinct in every part with the Presence of that ‘ Person 
expressing a reasonable purpose through Whom all things 
came into being, and apart from Whom not a single thing 
came into being which is of the nature of reality.’ There- 
fore, its call is the call of Christ. 

The thunder of our modern traffic, the manifold com- 
plexity of our modern industry, the intricate workings of 
modern economics and finance repeat, and give new force 
and meaning to the pleading of S. Paul for His Lord. 
“IT therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you 
that ye walk worthy of the call, wherewith ye are 
called; humble, for the world is God’s not yours; 
meek, for every human being with whom you are 
brought into contact is a soul for whom Christ died, a 
sacred personality, and you have no right to use Him for 
yourself ; patient, for the task is tremendous amd men are 
frail; forbearing one another in Love, for violence is useless, 
and domination does not help; endeavouring to keep in the 
bond of Peace the unity bestowed by the spirit of Christ, 
the only unity which in the end can hold. There is but one 
Body, lift up your eyes and look upon it, this new world 
Body that I have made, wrought of iron and of steel, 
whirling on its multitude of wheels within wheels, jointed 
w th a million miles of rail, with its wire nerves that tremble 
to the touch of thought, its very ether vibrant with reason- 
able speech. Sweat and blood, the tears and terror of 
mankind, the travail of the soul of God are in it—but it is 
done. There is but one Body, and there must be but one 


34 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


Spirit. If that body is to live it can only live in Him 
through Whom it was created—-the eternal WORD of God ; 
through Whom all things were made, and without Whom 
not a single thing was made which has been made. So 
through the thunder of our world machine there comes 
a human voice, saying : 


O heart I made, a heart beats here for thee, 
Face my hands fashioned see it in Myself, 

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine, 
But Love I gave Thee with myself to Love, 

And thou must Love me who have died for Thee. 


CHAPTER IV 


In Him was Life, 
And the life was the light of men, 
And the light shines in the darkness, 
And the darkness cannot overcome it. 
S. JOHN i, 4, 5. 


STILL the cry of the prisoned spirit, the agonizing effort to 
express the inexpressible, the signals of a man who has 
seen more than he can say. Life, Light, Darkness, great 
elemental metaphors which God Himself must in the end 
interpret to the soul. There was life before there was light. 
Darkness is the tragic unexplained and inexplicable back- 
ground of it all. It is the drama of a dawn that has not 
found as yet the glory of the perfect day. Before Man there 
was life but no light. There was sensation but no in- 
telligence. That is the miracle of man. In him we see mere 
sensation passing into intelligence. Yet the life of mere 
sensation persists, it clouds but cannot destroy intelligence. 
“ The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot 
overcome it.” 

Let us think of vision and what it means. Let us think 
of Browning’s poems in the claws of a chimpanzee. There 
is sensual sight keener and more powerful than our own. 
He sees the book, claws at it, smells it, tries to eat it, 
tears it into pieces and throws it away. Life but no light, 
sensation but no intelligence. You behaved like that when 
you were a baby. The whole world once behaved like that 
before the light dawned. There was once life, but no light. 

Millions and millions of living creatures seeing, hearing, 
smelling, touching, breeding, but not understanding. 
Darkness, which is not darkness to them because they have 
no light. 

Then think of Browning’s Poems in the hands of a boy 
of ten, or a prosperous but unenlightened stockbroker of 
forty. He sees it, he can read it, he can understand the 
relation of the printed symbols to one another, he can put 
them together and make with his lips the sounds they 
stand for. There is intellectual perception. But it does not 


36 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


interest him, he is bored with it. The boy will use it as a 
stand to put his toy steam engine on ; the man to prop up 
the leg of a wobbly table that he writes business letters 
on. ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness 
cannot overcome it.’ Both have an uneasy feeling that the 
book was meant for something else. 

Now think of Browning’s Poems in the hands of one who 
knows. There he sits rapt and still, and very happy, his 
body upon the earth, his soul in another world. 


It is not what man Does which exalts him, but what 
man would do! 

See the King—I would help him but cannot, the wishes 
fall through. 

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor 


to enrich, 

To fill up his, life starve my own out, [ would—knowing 
which 

I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through 
me now ! 


Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst 
Thou. So wilt Thou ! 
So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 


crown— 

And Thy Love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor 
down 

One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no 
breath, 

Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins issue 
with Death ! 

As Thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be 
proved 

Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being 
Beloved ! 


He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall 
stand the most weak. 
‘Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh 
that I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A ai ace like my face that receives thee : a Man like to 
€ 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 37 


Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever! A Hand like 
this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new Life to thee! See 
the Christ stand! 


He sees with the sensual sight of the animal, with the 
intellectual perception of the boy or the broker, but both 
are crowned and completed in the spiritual vision of the 
seer. He sees through the material page, and through 
the ordered symbolic sounds, the world of eternal values, 
the spiritual world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, the 
light of which the printed poem is the shadow. Yet he 
knows that he sees imperfectly, there is darkness still ; 
but the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, 
O, thank God, the darkness cannot overcome it.* Well, all 
the world is God’s poem, it is created through the WORD, 
and there is, therefore, a reason, a purpose, a sublime 
meaning in it. But, before that meaning can be grasped by 
men, life must pass into light, sensation must grow through 
intelligence into spiritual vision. The history of the living 
world from the protoplasm to the Christ, and of every 


*«The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot 
overcome it.’ Can’t it? Can’tit ? yousay. Itcan. It does. Millions 
live and die in the darkness. There is a glimmer of light in childhood 
while innocency lives on ignorance; then it flickers, fades, and dies, 
and men go out into the dark. What is the good of your wretched 
Christian optimism when you know it is not true. Don’t you know 
that men die in the dark ? Ido; Ido. Icannot explain it. I cannot 
explain the darkness. I can only defy and seek to destroy it in the 
power of the light, and I know that in some measure it can be 
destroyed. I do not know anything about it. I cannot say why 
or whence it comes. I only know that God did not make it. I 
know that the Word is not in it, nor is it in the Word. There is no 
reason and no purpose in it. Perhaps that is why it cannot be 
explained. You cannot reason about the unreasonable or explain 
the irrational. If you can make sense out of nonsense it never was 
nonsense. Evil is nonsense. It is irrational and mad. That is the 
very essence of it. It has no ultimate objective existence because it 
was not made by God through the Word, through Whom all things 
came into being, and apart from Whom not one single thing came 
into being which is of the nature of reality. Evil has no substance 
because it has no absolute value. If you bring it down to tin-tacks 
you can put that this way. If you submit to evil you are wasting 
your time. It isa fraud. Get rid of it quick. As long as you believe 
in it it will enslave you, but where there is light there is liberty, 


38 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


individual soul, which, in itself, recapitulates the story of 
the race, is the story of that passage from mere sensation 
to spiritual vision, from the vision of things, to the vision 
of the relation of things in time, to the vision of the value 
of things in eternity. 

There is no sense or meaning in the world as seen by 
sensual sight nor as seen by mere intellectual perception. 
So long as we live on the level of the senses, and the material 
intellect, we can never discern any meaning in life that will 
stand the test of time or the self-destructive power of the 
critical faculty. Mere intellect can do nothing but commit 
suicide. We cannot think in the light and live in the dark or 
dim twilight. The only world we can know is the world 
in which we live, which depends upon the kind of sight we 
have. We cannot think about or reason from any other 
world than that of our own experience. Yet there is a real 
world apart from our idea of it, there is an objective reality 
other than ourselves. There is a real poem written by 
God Himself, and there are a million million versions of it, 
in a million million minds, some come near to the poem 
itself, some are the wildest caricatures of it. No one can 
read the real poem unless he is in spiritual communion 
with the poet, who is God. Two men argue about the 
meaning of the world, and neither can convince the other, 
because they live in different worlds. Each is talking about 
the world of his own experience, and their experiences 
are utterly different. Each of us builds his own world out 
of the stimuli to which he responds, the things, that is, to 
which he attends. It is impossible for us to attend to a 
hundredth part of the things that claim our attention in the 
course of a single day, we are always, consciously or un- 
consciously, selecting what we shall see and what we shall 
hear. We attend only to what interests us, and so we see 
andfear mostly what we desire to see and hear. 

There is a story told of an old maiden lady who was very 
deaf. She went out for a walk one morning in the spring, 
accompanied by her sister. As they passed over a railway 
cutting, an express trairi dashed with a shriek into a tunnel, 
and Aunt Jane turned to her sister and said, with a beaming 
smile : ‘‘ My dear, I am sure I heard a lark sing.”’ There is 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 39 


humour and pathos in that. All morning that lark had been 
singing in her soul, and she interpreted the sound that 
reached her ears according to her heart’s desire. We all do 
the same. We cannot help it. All day long our eyes andears 
are assailed by a million sights and sounds, and we interpret 
them, and select from them, according to our heart’s desire. 
We are all of us really stronger in the heart than in the head. 
Pure reason is a fiction or abstraction. 

The great mistake which nineteenth century thinkers 
made was their calm assumption that men are born rational 
beings. They taught that, whereas animals were wholly 
impulsive and instinctive creatures, men were wholly 
rational. From this absurdly optimistic position experience 
and research combine to rout us utterly. Experience first, 
for if the history of the last ten years in Europe is to be read 
as the story of purely rational beings, then either the word 
rational loses its meaning, or history becomes an intolerable 
enigma. We have behaved like brute beasts. Mr. Bertrand 
Russell tells sad truth when he says that we might perchance 
attain to Peace and turn the Industrial Revolution from 
a curse into a blessing, if politics could become rational, 
but at present there is not the slightest sign of a change 
in that direction. What is called political reality is com- 
posed of passion and impulse for the most part, with 
thought, at best, as light just breaking through; very 
faint and dim as yet. ‘The darkness cannot overcome it,’ 
is still an act of faith rather than a statement of realized 
fact; it is a Truth discerned and discernible only by 
spiritual vision, not by intellectual perception. Rationality 
is not a natural inheritance, but a supernatural achieve- 
ment ; it comes from above and not below. 

Psychological research comes in to confirm experience, 
and enables us to see the reason of it. It makes quite clear 
the fact that our kinship with the animals, which Darwin 
demonstrated in the make-up of our bodies, must be 
admitted as extending further to the make-up of our 
minds. Not only do I look like a monkey, a fact which is 
sadly evident on the face of it, but I frequently behave like 
one. And so, gentle reader, however gentle and refined 
you be, so do you. The cynic says that women are cats, 


40 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


and men are dogs. Pause and ask yourself how often in the 
past twelve months that has been true of you. How often 
have you snarled and spit, and scratched, and bitten your 
fellows in the back, metaphorically of course, in thought 
and word, though not, perhaps, in deed. It would make 
our confessions more real sometimes if we confessed that we 
had behaved like cats and dogs, rather than that we were 
miserable sinners. There is a dignity we don’t deserve 
about a miserable sinner. Really, we have been just ugly 
beasts ; monkeys with a human brain. The most awful 
thing the mind can conceive is a gorilla with a Napoleonic 
intellect. Itis God’s mercy that we sinners are so often fools. 

We are born with a very powerful set of impulses 
and instincts which we share with the animals, and in them 
lie, to a large extent, the driving forces of our personalities. 

As Dr. William McDougall puts it: “‘ We may say then 
that directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime 
movers of all human activity ; by the conative or impulsive 
force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an 
instinct) every train of thought, however cold and passion- 
less it may seem to be, is borne along towards its end, 
and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The 
instinctive impulses determine the end of all activities, 
and supply the driving power by which all mental 
activities are sustained ; and all the complex intellectual 
apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means 
towards those ends, is but the instrument by which those 
impulses seek their satisfactions, while pressure and pain 
do but serve to guide them in their choice of means. Take 
away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful 
impulses, and the organism would become incapable of 
activity of any kind; it would lie inert and motionless 
like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been 
removed, or a steam engine whose fires had been drawn. 
These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and 
shape the life of individuals and societies, and in them we 
are confronted with the central mystery of life, and mind, 
and will.” 

That could not be better put. We are largely creatures of 
impulse, of sensation without intelligence, largely but not 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 4I 


wholly. The discovery of the leading part that impulse 
plays in the determination of our conduct, and the forma- 
tion of our judgments, has led to a violent swing of the 
pendulum, a swing from rationalism to irrationalism, from 
the uncritical worship to the uncritical contempt of reason. 
That will not do. We are largely animal, but we are not 
animals. An animal is born in a natural state of internal 
harmony—men are not ; they have to attain to and achieve 
internal harmony. Between the lowest man and the 
highest animal there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf immeasur- 
ably greater than that which exists between the highest 
and the lowest kind of man. An animal follows its impulses 
blindly, using what rudimentary intelligence it possesses, 
merely to enable it to satisfy its instinctive desires, and 
it lives thus in health and contentment. A man cannot do 
that; if he tries to doit, he is led neither to health nor to 
harmony, but to hell, in the truest sense of the word. That 
is the fallacy of the gospel of “‘ self-expression,’ before 
you have attained a self to express. If “self-expression” 
merely means the undisciplined satisfaction of disordered 
and unharmonized impulse, it can only, and will inevitably, 
lead you not to health and happiness, but to the death and 
disintegration of the personality, which is damnation. Let 
there be no mistake about that. Anyone who tells you that 
the way out of your moral conflicts is to give free rein 
to your desires, is either a knave or the most ignorant and 
dangerous kind of fool. If he cloaks his advice under the 
cant of modern psychology it is proof positive that he does 
not know B from a bull’s foot about it. 

We must achieve a self to express; we must 
attain to an internal harmony. And, although 
we are not borne with the harmony ready-made, 
we are born with an immensely powerful impulse to 
achieve it. The hall-mark of humanity is the urge to make 
a unity, a harmony of ourselves. This urge, which is, of 
course, essentially one, we can conveniently dissect for 
purposes of thought into two main manifestations, reason 
and religion. We are not born either rational or holy, 
but we are born reasoning and religious. The impulse to 
reason is the urge to make a harmony or unity of our 

D 


42 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


experience. It is always the perception of a discord that 
makes us think, the ‘pain in the mind’ of which we have 
already spoken. But the effort of our reason to make a 
harmony of experience will always be futile and unavailing, 
so long as the impulses and passions (which naturally 
determine our interests, and therefore determine the nature 
of our experience, which is built out of the things to which 
we attend because they interest us), are themselves un- 
harmonized and disordered. We cannot have an orderly 
mind with an undisciplined and chaotic heart. There is, 
therefore, in us an urge to unify our desire nature also, 
and this urge is the raw material of religion. 

From the subjective standpoint, that is, viewed from the 
inside, a man’s religion is his ruling passion. Man isnatur- 
ally addicted to ruling passions, to going “‘crazy”’ about 
things, as we say. Animals don’t do it. Cows don’t go 
crazy about chewing their cud, nor monkeys about cracking 
nuts or climbing trees, but there is hardly anything from 
the Love of God to gambling and golf about which men do 
not tend to go “‘crazy.”’ Millions of men count themselves 
sane because they invariably suffer from the proper 
popular madness. We still use a religious word for this 
strange human propensity we call it “ enthusiasm,” a word 
which implies that men are “inspired by” or “ possessed 
by’ a God. We even say, with an insight greater than 
we know, “ he makes a regular religion of it,” and “it ’’ may 
be anything—sport, sexual adventure, money-making, social 
position, etc., ad infinitum. But if you examine human 
enthusiasms, in all their variety, you will discover that they 
all centre around some powerful primitive instinct, or 
complex of instincts—sport round self-assertion and self- 
display, sexual adventure round sex, acquisition and self- 
assertion, money-making round acquisitiveness and self- 
assertion, social position round self-assertion and the herd 
instinct, and so on through an endless cycle of permutations 
and combinations all made of the same primitive elements. 

Examine yourself and see if that is not true of you. Ask 
what interests you and why? See that man in the corner 
of the railway carriage glued to a book, unconscious of 
time. What holds him? Ten to one it is a romance (sex), 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 43 


a detective story (curiosity), a battle or race or prize fight 
(pugnacity), a great career (self-assertion). The second or 
third-rate artist who works for money, if he knows his job, 
goes straight for your animal instincts and plays on them. 
It is one of the most paying jobs in the world at present, 
and one of the most pernicious. The advertisers use 
the power of sex to sell soap, cigarettes, boots, baby linen, 
and vacuum cleaners. They know you often better than you 
know yourself. That is how they make their money. 

A boy grows up through a series of enthusiasms 
which group themselves around his natural impulses 
as they develop, and these enthusiasms, which deter- 
mine his interests, tendto determine the experience 
out of which his reason has to make a harmony if he is 
to find health and peace. Religious growth and education, 
in their broadest sense, are the right development and 
direction of enthusiasm. But too often it is wrongly directed 
and badly developed. The desire nature of the boy or girl 
never attains to any sort of synthesis and harmony. He 
never really grows up. He then either suffers from one 
false religion after another, or gets one false one and sticks 
to it, or progressively loses his religious faculty altogether, 
and becomes gradually incapable of enthusiasm of any 
sort. The last state is in many ways the worst of all. It 
generally disguises some secret, unacknowledged, and more 
or less disreputable enthusiasm probably connected with 
sex or some odd phantasy of the self, a pose of some sort 
or other ; their name is legion. Many of those who scoff at 
religious devotion are devoted to the point of idiocy to 
things less sane and less reputable, probably themselves. 
You cannot get rid of religion by denying God, any more 
than you can get rid of Sex by refusing to marry. It only 
breaks out in another and probably less respectable 
place—some form of self-adoration. We are all desperately 
liable to hypocrisy, play-acting with ourselves as hero or 
heroine. Where absence of enthusiasm does not disguise a 
pose, a phantasy, or secret enthusiasm, it means that the 
man has ceased to live and begun to die more or less rapidly. 

In any case, where he has not attained to some synthesis 
and harmony of impulse, has not achieved any adequate 


44 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


and worthy enthusiasm which harmonizes his desire nature, 
he will continue to reason without ever becoming rational 
in the true sense of that word. His reason will continue 
the effort to build up a harmonious world out of a dis- 
cordant and meaningless experience, and will continually 
fail, until he gives it up and begins to die more or less 
under protest. Thousands of so-called living people are 
just more or less rabid Protestants against death. They 
refuse to grow old, they cannot remain young; and so 
they become artificial antique. Sex centred, self-centred, 
money-centred, anything and everything but God-centred 
anomalies ; elderly infantile misfits that wander round in 
worlds unrealized. That, as far as I can see, is what it 
means to be damned or at any rate in process of damnation. 

There is a very popular mistrust of enthusiasm which 
leads people to imagine that it is always and inevitably 
opposed to rationality. It is commonest among what are 
called practical people—men and women who are counted 
sane because their form of madness is peculiarly prevalent 
at the time, and they use all the fashionable drugs to make 
it tolerable. It includes all those hard-headed men who are 
convinced that the proper purpose of lifeis to make a living; 
which is manifestly a lunatic notion if one stops 
to think. The idea is that the way to attain ration- 
ality is to be enthusiastic about nothing, to divest the 
mind of emotion altogether, and so become purely rational. 
You therefore abandon religion, which is, as we have 
seen, a developed and directed enthusiasm. The phrase to 
conjure with among such is scientific, “‘ the scientific 
attitude,” ‘‘ the scientific mind.” This arises from the fact 
that success in the abstract sciences has been attained 
partly by divesting the mind, so far as possible, of all 
emotion, and approaching the subject in a spirit of detach- 
ment. And it is assumed that because this is possible in the 
realm of abstract science, it is therefore possible in the realm 
of concrete life. But there lies the fallacy. It is possible 
to be detached and emotionless about the binomial theorem 
because nobody, but the really rational enthusiast for pure 
Truth who discovered it, and the few who really under- 
stand it, care a hang whether it is true or not. Itis possible 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 45 


to be detached about somebody else’s banking account, 
and to treat it as a matter of pure mathematics, but it is 
not so easy with our own. But abstract questions are not 
the real questions of life ; they are not the principal con- 
stituents of our experience, the “ live issues ’’ about which 
it is most imperative that we should be rational. We have 
to become rational about questions involving the relations 
between our children and other people’s children (political 
questions), our country and other people’s countries 
(international questions), our pockets and other people’s 
pockets (economic questions), our pride and other people’s 
pride (personal questions), questions, that is, in which, by 
their very nature powerful primitive impulses are of 
necessity involved. When we pretend that we approach 
these live issues in a purely detached frame of mind, 
divested of all emotion, we indulge in puerile self-deception 
—conscious or unconscious. What we really do is to use our 
reason to justify and rationalize our passions and our 
prejudices, and the keener our intellect is the more 
efficiently does it serve their purposes. It is a stupid man, 
indeed, who cannot invent logical justifications for any 
policy or course of action which flatters his pride or fills his 
pocket. This is the twilight mind of the boy of ten or the 
broker of forty, who, up to a point, can make anything 
true that he desires to be true. It is also, in a subtler form, 
the academic mind, which attains to reason by forsaking 
life, and worshipping a theory, a theory which is very 
often a thin and inadequate disguise for the impulse of 
self-assertion. The peculiar vice of second-rate scholars is 
self-conceit. This is the material intellect, the intellect which 
still serves the impulses, however they may be disguised. 
The primitive impulses cannot be destroyed or ignored, 
they must be harmonized and unified, centred in one 
worthy and dominant desire, which is your religion. There 
is, therefore, no way to rationality, in the true sense, 
except through religion. Religion and rationality are two 
aspects of one thing, the one cannot really exist without 
the other. Religion, of course, is not necessarily a good 
thing. It may be, and often is, the vilest and most con- 
temptible of all things; it entirely depends, for its worth 


46 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


or worthlessness, upon its object. ‘‘ Tantum religio potuit 
suadere malorum’”’ (See Thou to what vile deeds religion 
draweth men) is a great truth. In the name of religion, 
men have done the most repulsive and disgusting deeds, 
and done them with a rampant and reckless certainty 
that they were right, which made them impervious to 
reason or argument. 

Just because true religion is the best, false religion is the 
worst of all things. ‘‘ Corruptio optimi pessima.” That is 
why it is the very crown and climax of shallow-thinking cant 
to say that it does not matter what you believe. It is the 
one thing in the world that does matter. Literally every- 
thing depends upon it as far as you and your worth to 
God and man is concerned. To say that it does not matter 
is to assert that, so long as you centre your whole life round 
someone or something, it does not matter in the least what 
it is. The enthusiastic and devoted miser is as good as the 
devoted and enthusiastic minister; the devout hunter of 
honours, as sane as the devout healer of men. That is 
manifestly absurd. Religion is a dangerous thing. It is 
mental dynamite which can either blow you to heaven or 
drive you to hell. 

There is only one way of becoming rational on “ live 
issues,’’ questions in which by their very nature primitive 
impulses and passions are involved, and that is by the 
possession of one supreme and worthy passion which can 
dominate and direct, without destroying, your other 
passions, one supreme and worthy enthusiasm which can 
include and yet control all lesser enthusiasms. This is your 
religion, your passion for God. You cannot be sane 
unless you are crazy about Christ and The WORD. You 
are then mad upon the highest form of sanity. Through 
the power of this passion, if it be pure and strong, you 
pass from sensual sight, through intellectual perception, 
to spiritual vision, and are able to discern the true meaning 
of life, reading God’s poem with a heart in full sympathy 
with the poet, and so more and more the light shines in the 
darkness, and the darkness tends to die away. In the 
power of the sublime white hot enthusiasm which is 
true religion, the lower passions are lifted up, sublimated 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 47 


as the psychologists say. Your interest, and therefore your 
attention, are directed more and more to the Good, the 
Beautiful, and the True. Your experience improves in 
quality, as you see things you never saw, and hear things 
you never heard, not that they were not there to see and 
hear, but you were blind and deaf, because you were not 
interested. Now the task of your reason becomes a possible 
one, your experience becomes a unity with a meaning, you 
discern the purpose and value of life, and learn to cry with 
utter conviction, ‘‘ In the beginning was the Word,” there 
is reason at the heart of things. Then you become rational 
about your children and other people’s children, because 
they are all God’s children, your country and other coun- 
tries because they are God’s countries, your pocket and 
other people’s pockets because all good things are of God to 
be held in trust from Him. Then, and not till then, am I 
prepared fully to trust your judgment upon live issues. 
Until then the cleverer you are the more I suspect that 
your reason will but serve your passions. 

It is right that we should pray “ God who didst teach the 
hearts of Thy faithful people by the sending to them the 
Light of Thy Holy Spirit, grant us by the same Spirit to 
have a right judgment in all things.”” The power of right 
judgment is not a natural heritage but a supernatural 
achievement. It is from above and not below. If we are to 
be truly rational on live issues, ‘‘ we must be born again.” It 
is that true rationality our modern world demands if it is 
to be saved from destruction. We are full of cleverness, 
wisdom which comes not from above but is earthly, 
animal, even devilish, leading to envy, rivalry and all 
kinds of crooked dealing. But we must have the wisdom— 
the rationality—which is from above—and which is first 
of all pure, then peace loving, respectful of personality 
in others, open to conviction on evidence, with plenty 
of human kindness in it, based upon an honest life, free 
from prejudice and insincerity (S. James ili, 15). We must 
have that. Civilization demands it as a necessity, and we 
cannot get it, without real religion, an increasing devotion 
to the one true God and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent— 
the WORD Who alone brings life to perfect light in men. 


CHAPTER V 
The Word became Flesh.—S. JOHN 1. 14. 


SomE Greeks came and asked to see Jesus. The story is never 
finished. Read it and see (S. John xii. v. 20-32.) We do 
not know whether they ever saw Him or not. They 
were brought to Him, but that does not mean that they 
saw Him. Thousands came to Him and never saw Him 
at all. He Himself, when He was told that they wanted 
to see Him, was seized with a sudden agony of soul. He 
saw Himself as a seed thrown into the ground to rot and 
to die. His soul was full of trouble. He cried out as it were, 
““T tell you it is no good, if they want to see Me, they must 
die. It is no use their coming just to look, they won’t 
see anything but a man, a teacher, another philosopher, 
and the world is full of them, full of learned talk that flows 
like a river to be lost in an open empty sea. They must 
die first. He who holds his life dear is not living at all, 
only putting off death. It is only those who are content 
to throw their lives away who can see Me and find eternal 
life, which is to know the one true God and Jesus Christ 
whom He has sent. He who sees Me stands face to face 
with the ultimate reality of all things, all illusions, idols, 
drugs are taken from him, all his old life must rot within 
him, rot until it sickens him to look at it, his last vestige 
of pride must go—he must die, he must give up the idea 
that he is anything, has anything, can do anything apart 
from Me. These Greeks, these intellectuals, can never 
save the world. Their reason only serves their self- 
assertion. They never see Me, they only see themselves 
in Me, and that is no good.” 

No one can save the world who is afraid to die. No 
one can see Jesus who is afraid to die. That is the terrible 


48 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 49 


truth of His divinity. It was always the same with Him. 
He cried to men ‘Come unto Me,’ but when they came 
He warned them. A rich young man came, ‘a thoroughly 
good fellow ’ as we say, who had kept the commandments 
all his life. Jesus loved him, but He did not spare him. 
“You are all bound up with this money of yours and 
your position, it is the animal life of the impulses really, 
self-assertion and self-display, you are still only a semi- 
intelligent peacock with a big tail. ‘Come out of it,’ ‘Come 
out of it,’ get quit of all this nonsense—and live. Sell all 
that thou hast and follow me.” 

A man ran after Him and said he wanted to go to the 
ends of the earth with Him, and He turned on him with, 
“ The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests— 
but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head. 
It is not what you think it is, following Me. It is like 
death, loneliness, homelessness. You have got to be alone, 
I say, you cannot even bring your father and your mother 
with you, you must learn to hate them if they stand 
between you and me.’ You must die first. It is always 
the same terrible story. Nicodemus going out a bewildered, 
grey-haired, groping figure, through the darkened streets 
of the holy city after his talk beneath the stars, muttering 
to himself, “‘I must be born again, and I am old—old! 
How can a man be born again when he is old?” 

There is Zacchaeus standing in his office with his books 
and money bags about—stripping himself naked of every- 
thing. ‘“‘ Half my goods I’ll give to the poor, and if I 
have defrauded anyone I will pay him back fourfold.” 
“ Dirt,” he says, “ dirt, you can have the lot, I want Life.”’ 

That is what it always meant to see Jesus. No one 
ever saw Him and remained the man he was before. To 
those who truly saw Him, He always became, and has 
always become, the whole meaning of life—the Incarnate 
WORD. 


Who that one moment has the least descried Him, 
Dimly and faintly, hidden and afar, 

Doth not despise all excellence beside Him, 
Pleasures and powers that are not and that are. 


50 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


Ay, amid all men bear himself thereafter, 
Smit with a solemn and a sweet surprise, 

Dumb to their scorn and turning on their laughter, 
Only the dominance of earnest eyes ? 


describes the experience of Zacchaeus, of Nicodemus, 
and of all who really saw Him in the days of His Flesh, 
just as truly as it describes the experience of those who 
saw Him after His Resurrection, and of those countless 
thousands who have seen Him since by the power of the 
Spirit. He is the same yesterday—to-day—and for ever— 
the Incarnate Revelation of the true meaning, value and 
purpose of all life. There was always Birth—Death— 
Resurrection—and Ascension in the face of Christ for 
those who saw Him as He was. 

The great Acts of His earthly life were but the expression 
in time of His eternal nature. He always brought to 
those who saw Him, a New Birth, an agony of Crucifixion, 
a Resurrection, and an Ascension, and through that four- 
fold act of the inmost soul, a conviction of touch with 
ultimate reality, a new vision of the meaning of the world 
and of God’s creation. Thousands there were who saw 
Him only with the sensual sight, as the chimpanzee sees 
the poems of Browning, they tried to use Him to give 
them food, to satisfy their lust of power and their greed, 
they touched Him, mauled Him, clawing at Him for 
themselves, then, when they found He was no use, they 
tore Him into bleeding pieces and threw Him away. 
Thousands saw Him with intellectual perception, they 
asked Him questions, argued with and about Him, tried 
to get Him on to their side, and use Him for their schemes, 
and when they found He was no use they led the animals 
to tear Him limb from limb. But there were those who 
saw Him with spiritual vision, they saw the spiritual 
world of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, the world of absolute 
values, of which He was the WORD—the perfect expression. 
And for them there was always a New Birth, a Death and 
Crucifixion ; a Resurrection and an Ascension. For those 
four acts are one in Christ eternally. It is not for nothing 
that our great Creeds have seized upon the four, and made 
them the essence of the Gospel. 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 51 


A speaker at the C.O.P.E.C. Conference at Birmingham 
complained that those who drew up the Creeds were not 
interested in the ‘Jesus of History.’ They paid no attention 
to His earthly life, they only concerned themselves with His 
miraculous Birth, His Atoning death, His supernatural 
Resurrection and Ascension. But we modern men and 
women had recovered the picture of the historical Jesus, and 
were mainly concerned with that. In books like ‘‘ The Jesus 
of History,” by Dr. Glover, we could see once more the 
gracious human figure as it moved among the Sons of 
men, converting the sinful, healing the sick, blessing the 
children. This, he said, and rightly said, was the treasure 
that modern Scholarship had bestowed upon the Church 
of God, a portrait of Jesus, drawn and coloured to the 
life. 

No one ought to belittle or despise that portrait. It is the 
most perfectly beautiful thing in the world. But as we 
stand before it, and study it, it challenges us, we cannot 
be content to see it with intellectual perception and 
appreciation alone, it drives us deeper, and forces us to 
ask, ““What does it mean?’”’ When we lay down these 
books, even the best of them, we remain unsatisfied. 
Here is a great fact of History. The great Historical fact. 
What is its significance ? What is its relation to reality ? 
What does it tell us about the meaning of the tragic world 
in which we live? The books that have been written by 
the opposite school of thinkers, led by Loisy and Tyrrell, 
which minimise the importance of the historical figure, 
saying, indeed, that it is not necessary to think of the 
picture as being historical at all, since all that matters 
is the Spiritual Truth it reveals, contain the other side 
of Truth. To ask whether the portrait is historic or symbolic 
is to put a false dilemma. If it is historic it must be 
in the truest sense, symbolic. All history is symbolic, 
unless the world in which we live is mad and without 
meaning. If it is true that “right at the heart 
of the ultimate reality there eternally exists a Person 
expressing a rational purpose,” then that purpose runs 
through history, and is, in some measure, revealed by every 
historical event, though much more fully revealed by 


52 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


some events than by others. On the other hand a symbolic 
picture which is not historic in some sense cannot be known 
for certain as the symbol of reality. 

The portrait is at once historic and symbolic. And it is 
when we strive to penetrate the symbolic Fact of Christ and 
discover the Truth symbolized, that we understand why the 
early Christianpreachers tore out of the life those four great 
pictures, and held them up before the world as the essential 
facts of faith. There is the Babe of Bethlehem, born by 
the Will of God, there is the broken figure bleeding on the 
Cross, there is the empty tomb and the Christ that cries 
across the world, ‘‘ Behold I am alive for evermore,” 
and there is the calm majestic Lord with wounded hands 
outstretched to bless ascending into Glory. And these 
four are One in Christ, and He is the meaning of History, 
and the revelation of the purpose of the world. It was 
the WORD that became Flesh, expressing His nature in the 
terms of our Humanity, it was the WORD—the Person 
expressing a reasonable purpose through Whom all things 
came into being, and apart from Whom not a single thing 
came into being which is of the nature of reality. The 
history of the world, of mankind, and of each individual 
soul, is the Birth, The Crucifixion, The Resurrection and 
Ascension to perfection of that life which is light in men, 
but light shining in darkness until we all in heart and mind 
with Him ascend and in Him continually dwell, Who 
was born on Christmas Day and Ascended into Heaven, 
the WORD that became flesh. 

The first meaning of life, the life both of individuals 
and of societies, which are but two aspects of one thing, 
is that it is a New Birth, the coming to birth of that 
new life, the quality of which in all its beauty was revealed 
in Jesus Christ; the life which S. John calls eternal life, 
or the life of the ages. This life, which is mere sensation 
in the lower creation, becomes coherent thought or con- 
sciousness in man, and that consciousness becomes perfect 
and complete only as it finds its true harmony and unity 
in Christ, the God in whom reason and religion, ex- 
perience and the emotion of experience, find their true 
goal and fulfilment; in Whom and to Whom, therefore, 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 53 


we must all be born again. “ For we know that the whole 
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until 
now, and not only they but ourselves also who have the 
first fruits of the spirit, we ourselves groan within ourselves 
waiting for the adoption to wit the redemption of our 
body.” 

God coming, God seeking, God being born, God Loving 
and Giving, giving in all things, and finally in His Son, 
that is the basis of Christian Truth. 

Herein is Love, not that we Loved Him but that He 
loved us. Advent, the coming of God, is a more accurate 
and significant name for the creative process than Evolu- 
tion. To say that the world was made by evolution, 
if it means anything, merely means that it grew up in an 
orderly way, but to say that the world was made by Advent 
or by Christmas, is to say that the meaning, the purpose, 
and the true value of that orderly growth are revealed in 
Christ. 

So, as our minds swing back bewildered down the vistas 
of biological and geological time, and we read again the 
mysterious story of man’s past, reaching back to find a 
kinship with the very stocks and stones, and ask our- 
selves—what does it mean ? Christianity answers, “‘it means 
Christmas, the coming of God in Christ.’”’ There have 
been many odd names invented for this “‘ Coming God ”— 
George Bernard Shaw calls Him “ the evolutionary urge,” 
the Dean of S. Paul’s ““ some immanent teleology,’’ Bergson 
“ élan vital.’’ All of these cumbrous and pedantic names 
mean that life looks like, and is the result of, something 
or someone coming, being born in time, seeking expression 
in creation. That impression of someone coming grows 
deeper and deeper as we study the life of men and things, 
and all these modern inventions bear witness to it; but 
our faith goes further, as a living faith must do, and 
declares that the Coming One was, and is, Christ, in Whom 
all things consist, or hang together, finding a rational 
significance. The whole of the New Testament is bathed 
in the light of that Truth. Life has no meaning, apart 
from the New Birth, the New Life, the life that issues 
from and gives meaning to the ages—-which is in Christ. 


54 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


Our life so far as it is real is not a sleep and a forgetting, 
but a coming to birth, a birth which is the act of God. 


Because in tender majesty, 
Thou cam’st to earth nor stayed till we 
Poor sinners stumbled up to Thee, 

I thank my God. 


Because the Saviour of us all 

Lay with the cattle in their stall, 

Because the Great comes to the small, 
I thank my God. 


Because upon a Mother’s breast, 
The Lord of Life was laid to rest, 
And was of Babes the loveliest, 

I thank my God. 


Because the Eternal Infinite, 

Was once that naked little mite, 

Because, O Love, of Christmas night, 
I thank my God. 


But this New Life means Death to the old. There is, 
and there always was, as we have seen, death in the eyes 
of Christ. He is the God of unbearable Beauty that breaks 
the hearts of men. Bethlehem without Calvary would 
be no true picture of Life. It could not face its deepest 
mystery. It is because right at the heart of the Faith 
there stands this barbarous brutality, that I can cling 
to it as true to Life as I know it. Life as a New Birth, 
even though through travail, would not reflect the facts. 
There is not merely pain, there is cruelty, injustice, torture, 
exquisite and unmerited agony in every phase of human 
life. There is not merely sorrow, there is sorrow’s crown 
of sorrow, human sin. 

Life demands a Cross as its meaning. When one ponders 
over the facts, and reads the rolls, of human history and 
asks, “What does it mean?” ‘“‘ What is God like in 
Whom it finds its meaning?” Almost, one expects, 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 58 


that broken tortured figure and the bloody sweat upon 
the ground. 

Life 1s a tragedy. It is impossible to escape from 
that except by wilful blindness. There is no justice in 
it, if by justice you mean that pleasure and pain are 
measured out according to deserving or merit. It is ever 
the best and bravest who suffer most. Christ was open 
and honest about that. He never promised men cushions, 
always a cross. We find that the hardest fact to face up 
to. We are convinced that we deserve to be justly treated 
in this life, and that there is something we have a right to 
be angry about if we suffer injustice. We say we cannot 
believe in God because of the injustice of the world. 
Well, if the Christian Faith taught that this world, as we 
see it, is a just world, and that we get here always what 
we deserve, I could not believe it. It would be a piteous 
illusion and a lie. There is no justice in the world as seen 
by sensual sight or mere intellectual perception. It is 
useless looking for it. No mere philosophy can justify 
the ways of God to men. As apprehended by the intellect 
it is as irrational, as blind, and as brutal as Calvary. 

“It is not fair! It is not fair! ’’ Poor souls come and cry 
out to me, and I hear a voice out of the darkness crying, 
“My God! My God! Why?” I hear it again and 
again. A man sentenced to years of imprisonment as the 
result of an inherited mental disease cries out in rebellion, 
the good mother of an abandoned son, the innocent girl 
betrayed and tossed aside, the woman whose hope of 
Love was murdered on the battlefields of France crying 
from the unconscious for the child she cannot have, a 
monotonous interminable procession, some in anger, 
some sullen, some scornful, some brokenly submissive, 
but all in the dark and asking Why? The question no 
mortal man can answer. Yes, it needs a Cross to meet 
it, and it needs a Christ to bear it and not break. If 
Christianity tried to explain away all the torture of human 
life, and to prove that it was just and fair, it would be a 
heartless mockery, and I would rather go to hell for honest 
unbelief, than gain the highest heaven by the treachery 
of faith. But it does not do that. It takes the Cross 


56 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


and plants it in the centre of the world. It says, “ I know, 
there in that wounded writhing Body is the history of the 
world, the story of man’s life on earth. It is as tragic and 
as terrible as that, but look up, look beyond the Cross to 
the Christ—and there is the meaning, and the purpose 
of it all.” 

He does not ask for pity. He needs none. It is 
those around the Cross that are piteous, not He who hangs 
upon it. He knows that. ‘‘ Father forgive them, they 
know not what they do.”’ They are in the dark. That is 
what darkness means. That is the life of mere sensation, 
of crude instinct and impulse, as it works in men, it is always 
as obscene and hideous as the crowd about the Cross, 
sweating, spitting, jeering, lusting with cruel lust of pain, 
hating and slobbering out their hatred in foul speech, 
it is always like that, you can see the like in any mob, 
or see it in yourself next time you sin, but look up, “ The 
Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot 
overcome it.’’ That is what the darkness means to the 
light, what violence means to reason, what lust means to 
love, what pride means to humility, suffering like that, 
but the light can bear the darkness and break through. 
The New Life can rise above it, triumph over it, trample 
it under foot, and that New Life is yours in Him. He 
brought it down to earth for you—Who for us men and for 
our Salvation came down from Heaven, and was Incarnate— 
the WORD who revealed the quality of eternity in time. 
That Life is yours in Him, and He is seeking you now 
that He may give it you. He is seeking you now as I 
write and you read. I could not write this, if He had not 
done that. The Cross is God’s Word. 

As these feeble words are my language ; as through this 
act in time of pen and ink I seek to reach you, as all I have 
or am, God help me, is behind this written and rewritten 
page, so through this act of suffering in time, as language, 
God seeks you. All that He has, and is, is behind it. It is not 
that He sought you once in the past, but that He seeks 
you now in the present. As, when you read these words, 
they will be a past act of mine, a record of what I was 
and did on this autumn morning with God’s glory of 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 57 


death still golden on the trees, yet I, the living I, will be 
in them, and they will only help you just so far as the 
living God is in me, and so far as He takes them and 
interprets them to you, so, as you stand before the Cross, 
it is a past act of Jesus Christ in time, a record of what He 
was and did upon a hill where you may stand outside 
an earthly city wall, yet He, the living Christ is in it, 
and it helps you because He was the Very Son of God, 
and because the urgent Love of God takes it and interprets 
it to you. Just as these words will be Greek, Hebrew, 
nonsense to you, unless God uses them now in answer 
to your prayer, for what I have to say cannot be said, 
so the Cross will be foolishness, repulsive foolishness to 
you, unless God speaks through it now. Salvation is always 
the act of God, but an act through a Word, the WORD of 
the Cross. This ts the crucial passage in the story of the 
world, it 1s the key to the whole book. The chapters have no 
sense in them until you come to this. It is written and 
many waters cannot wash it out. Pilate spoke more 
truly than he knew, “‘ What I have written I have written,” 
and it has lasted down the ages, “ He was crucified under 
Pontius Pilate.” If through these words God finds 
your soul, it will be because through that Word He first 
found mine, and showed to me the meaning of Life. So 
far as they are my words they will fail, so far as they are 
His Word they will win their way. 

On June 7th, 1917, I was running to our lines half mad 
with fright, though running in the right direction, thank 
God, through what had been once a wooded copse. It 
was being heavily shelled. As I ran I stumbled and fell 
over something. I stopped to see what it was. It was 
an undersized, underfed German boy, with a wound in his 
stomach and a hole in his head. I remember muttering, 
“You poor little devil, what had you got to do with it? 
not much great blonde Prussian about you.’”’ Then there 
came light. It may have been pure imagination, but that 
does not mean that it was not also reality, for what is 
called imagination is often the road to reality. It seemed 
to me that the boy disappeared and in his place there lay 


the Christ upon His Cross, and cried, ‘‘ Inasmuch as ye 
E 


58 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


have done it unto the least of these my little ones ye have 
done it unto me.” From that moment on I never saw a 
battlefield as anything but a Crucifix. From that moment 
on I have never seen the world as anything but a Crucifix. 
I see the Cross set up in every slum, in every filthy over- 
crowded quarter, in every vulgar flaring street that speaks 
of luxury and waste of life. I see Him staring up at me 
from the pages of the newspaper that tells of a tortured, 
lost, bewildered world. 

“Ever and always I can see set up above this world of 
ours, a huge and towering cross with great arms stretched 
out East and West, from the rising to the setting sun, 
and on that Cross my God still hangs and calls on all 
brave men and women to come out, and share His sorrow 
and help to save the World.” 


Red with His Blood the better day is dawning, 
Pierced by His pain the storm clouds roll apart, 

Rings o’er the earth the Message of the morning, 
Still on the Cross the Saviour bears His Heart. 


Passionate and low the Voice of God is pleading, 
Pleading with men to arm them for the fight, 
See how those Hands majestically bleeding 
Call us to rout the armies of the night. 


But the Vision of Life in the Cross is not a vision of 
despair, but of confidence and hope, because behind it 
there is the empty tomb, and the figure with wounded 
hands outstretched to bless, ascending into glory. That 
completes The WORD made Flesh which reveals the mean- 
ing of Life. Without that we would gomad. We need not, 
must not feel that death is the end. That is what we 
are all terrified of—Death. If we are to be born again 
we must die, we must be crucified with Him, and we feel 
that, if we do that, if we give up the old life, the lust that 
burns and stings, the pride that satisfies, the comfort that 
lulls us into sleep, if we cease to believe in the pleasures 
of the senses, and the satisfaction of the animal instincts 
as the true joy of life, there is nothing left, absolutely 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 59 


nothing, that we shall die, and we cannot bear it. A 
man must have something to live for. Some day, of course, 
we must give it all up—but not yet. Some day the flesh 
will grow weary, and the pride of life will wither away, 
we will grow old, but not yet, time enough when we must; 
and so we spend our lives postponing death—and clutching 
greedily all we can get; torturing one another to gobble 
up all we can snatch from the Table of the Lord. We 
kick the weaker brother out of the way, or keep him in a 
foul and filthy cellar out of sight, while we tear with our 
teeth at the flesh of life. We cook the flesh and lay it 
daintily before us, we are refined, until the feast is 
threatened, then we can be as brutal as wolves, prepared 
to rip and rend that we may live, because we dare not die. 
The Society papers and all the commercialized system 
of animal appeal for every class, tell us that the flesh is 
good. ‘“‘ Eat, you fools—Eat,’ they say ‘‘ Women are still 
soft and white, wine is still red—eat and drink—for there 
is nothing else—but death.’’ Apart from the satisfaction 
of the sensual or sensuous desires, we feel that life would 
be an utter blank, and that is the most terrifying thing in 
the world. We cannot stand it. We even use the Christian 
religion sentimentalized as a sop—and imagine we can 
have everlasting life without death at all. There is no 
need to die. God is very good-natured and will let us off, 
has, in fact, let us off because Christ died. We have per- 
verted and distorted the Truth of the Gospel by imagining it 
to mean that, if we accept death when it is forced upon us, 
we shall be transported by the mere act of physical death into 
an eternal life which is an extension of this. Whereas 
Christ was always insisting that the only way to life was 
to die here and now for His sake and the Gospel’s, that 
we may live in Him. We must face that blankness, that 
nothingness, that feeling that we are giving up everything 
worth having, and that there is nothing left, in order that 
we may find Him, and the longer we put it off, the harder 
it is to do. We must die to live, and we can never do it 
except through the Power of His Resurrection. It is the 
Risen and Ascended Christ that saves. The fourfold picture 
is one in Truth. A new Birth without a Crucifixion is im- 


60 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


possible, a Crucifixion without a Resurrection would drive 
any human being stark staring mad. He would commit 
suicide, which is the maddest of all mad things, an attempt 
to murder God. To see the world as a Crucifix without an 
empty tomb would be a vision too terrible for any human 
being to look upon, it would drive him, like Judas, shrieking 
with horror into the night to which there are no stars. 
We must have the whole faith. The meaning of Life is 
Advent, Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Day, Ascension- 
tide, and Pentecost—for the Word became Flesh and 
dwelt amongst us—and that was the manner of His 
dwelling. 

That is why it is said, ““When He went up on High, 
He led His captives into captivity and gave gifts to man- 
kind.”’ Now this “going up”? must imply that He had 
already ‘‘ gone down ”’ into the world beneath. He who 
“came down ’”’ is the same as He who “ went up ’’—up 
beyond the highest heaven that He might fill all things with 
His Presence—and He it is who gives to the Church true 
workers of every kind, for the building up of the Body 
of Christ. And this shall continue until we all attain to 
that unity which is given by faith, and a fuller knowledge 
of the Son of God; until we reach the ideal man, the 
full standard of the perfection of the Christ. Then we 
shall no longer be like silly children tossed to and fro and 
blown about by every breath of human teaching, through 
the trickery and cunning craft of animal men spreading 
their own deception; but holding the Truth in a Spirit 
of Love, we shall evolve into complete union with Him 
Who is our Head, Christ Himself. (Ephes. iv, 8-15). 
Born-—Crucified—Risen and Ascended. 


CHAPTER VI 
And we beheld His glory.—S. JouN i. v. 14 


WE beheld His glory. Here is the individual expression 
of a corporate experience, the personal testimony to the 
reality of a new Social life. That is the hall-mark of 
Christianity. It was in the beginning, is now, and ever 
shall be, a true community life. The New Birth, the 
Crucifixion, the Resurrection and Ascension become 
realities to the soul in and through the Brethren. Always 
Christ calls men into a company in which they are to find 
a life different from the life of the world. The Christian 
witness to the world is to be a new quality of social life, 
and, so far as there has been any real Christian witness, 
it always has been that and nothing else. Christian 
Holiness has never been anything but Love, creating a 
company of men and women which acted as the Bodyof 
Christ filled with His Life, sharing His sufferings, 
partaking of His triumph, growing with His growth ; 
a body bearing the marks of the Lord Jesus, born, crucified, 
risen and ascending with Him. A solitary Christian is 
a contradiction in terms. There never has been such a 
thing. Men dispute as to whether He founded a Church. 
And they may well dispute it, if by “founding” a 
Church they mean mere organizing as we understand it, 
calling a committee, appointing officers, drawing up rules, 
issuing propaganda, etc., all the rest of the interminable 
process by which human societies live and die, a process 
which may be a process of life or death, according 
61 


62 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


to what it expresses. Its various stages, in some form 
or other, are inevitable manifestations of human life, 
and those who despise and ignore them either do not 
manifest life, or else they reproduce the process and call it 
by a different name. Protestantism despised the Church 
and immediately founded innumerable Churches. Human 
life, wherever it appears, takes a community form, only the 
life must produce the form, the form cannot produce the 
life. Eternal life, which is human life made perfect in 
Christ, does not, and cannot, exist without a community 
form, but we are mad if we suppose that we can produce 
the life by making a new form, or maintain it by preserving 
an old one. We are always trying to do that and failing. 
Christ did form a committee, appoint officers, draw up 
rules and issue propaganda. He could not help Himself, 
and did not want to. He washuman. The WORD became 
Flesh. We are always drawing up new rules because we 
did not keep the old ones, making a new order because we 
did not observe the old. We despise the Churches because 
our souls are sick for the Church. We make new forms 
because we long for the new Life. 

Some suppose that it is the form that kills the life, 
and so want to do without one altogether. They are 
filed with contempt and loathing of the poverty-stricken 
Church they see, and sick with desire for the true one, 
so they want to destroy all form, and live in the Spirit. 
God pity the poor dears, lots of us would like to jump 
out of our skins, but it would not really help us, we could 
only jump into another one. Even hereafter we are not 
to be formless Spirits, “ there is a natural body, and there is 
a spiritual body.” Often I fear their longing for a form- 
less Church means a deficiency rather than an excess of 
life, it means, not that they are too good for the Church, 
but that they are not good enough. They want freedom, 
but it is often freedom for their pride, their contempt of 
their neighbours, their resentment of all interference 
with what they like best. They want to find a Church 
which will be to them a refuge from their fellow men, 
especially from the ones they do not like, and there are 
so many they do not like, that they feel it would be safer 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 63 


not to be bound to any of them, but to worship God alone, 
with at any rate a minimum of interference from the rest 
of humanity. It is dreadful to have little curates in black 
clothes running round trying to be like Jesus Christ, and 
Bishops in gaiters begging for money to run the Diocese. 
They do not like meetings and services, they feel nearest 
to God in the open air, or in an old Church, it must be old, 
where they can be alone. The truth is that their souls 
are too refined, and their intelligence too highly cultivated, 
to stand the vulgarity and triviality of the Church. Of 
course they do not despise anyone, but they do want to 
be left alone. This organized religion is revolting, it is 
death to the spiritual life. 

But if your spiritual life is as refined as all that, it is 
too delicate to live. It is too spiritual to be human. If 
you are so select that you cannot do with men, you 
will be missing God Almighty, Who is not nearly so 
exclusive. The fact of the matter is that you are a fraud, 
a conscious or unconscious fraud, and what you really 
want is a Church big enough to contain your own conceit, 
and there is not one. If you had your way you would 
find not salvation but the most complete damnation of 
your soul. You sigh and say: 


I would buy me a perfect Island Home, 
Sweet set in a southern sea, 

And there I would build me a paradise 
For the heart of my Love and me. 


I would plant me a perfect garden there, 
The one that my dream soul knows. 

And the years would flow as the petals grow 
That flame to a perfect rose. 


I would build me a perfect temple there, 
A shrine where my Christ might dwell. 
* * * K * * 


And then you would wake to behold your soul 
Damned deep in a perfect Hell. 


64 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


You could not help it, it would be inevitable. You can | 
only learn to love God as you learn to love your fellow- 
men. S&S. John is very blunt about it in his Epistle, 
and says that if you profess to love God and do not 
love the Brethren, and he means by that primarily your 
fellow Christians, you are a liar. ‘“‘ We know that we have 
passed from death unto life because we love the brethren.” 
The acid test of religious reality is power to produce 
community life. You cannot have unorganized Christ- 
ianity, there never has been such a thing, and never will 
be. 

It was upon a company that the Spirit descended at 
Pentecost, and the first result of that descent was to drive 
the company out to form a community, which was so 
filled with the New Life, that they attempted the im- 
possible, and tried to hold all things in common, abolishing 
private property. And although that sublime and prema- 
ture effort failed, yet wherever the new life went, there 
sprang up communities having within them a new power 
of social unity. 

New committees, new rules of life, new red hot propa- 
ganda sprang up everywhere. There were conferences 
at Jerusalem, laws for the Gentile Churches, fiery tracts 
from S. Peter and S. Paul. There were dissensions and 
divisions, a wretched sense that the divisions were all 
wrong, and tremendous efforts to attain to unity. There were 
all the marks of this dreadful organized Christianity that 
we have to-day within twenty years of the Crucifixion. 
There were Priests that went wrong, Judas was the first, 
and saints that turned out sinners, as in Corinth. But 
there never was any doubt that Christian Life was a com- 
munity life, and that the Will of God was the Unity of 
mankind in Him. Moreover, the idea that somehow or 
other Christian men and women should hold their goods 
in common has never ceased to haunt the minds of those 
who found new Life in Him. They have never been 
really satisfied with the idea of absolute property. It 
has always been foreign to their whole conception of life. 
If Christian Communism was beyond them, at any 
rate everyone was to look upon what he possessed as a 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 65 


trust from God to be used for the welfare of the 
Brethren. 

Every fresh Revival of the New Life was accompanied 
by some protest against the system that left untouched 
extremes of wealth and poverty. Monasticism was an 
attempt to realize the perfect Christian Community, a 
life in which men could work and earn their bread to the 
glory of God, and for the love of the Brethren. 

The score of heretical sects that arose in the middle 
ages, such as the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Beghards, 
the Brethren of the Common Lot, were all efforts to main- 
tain a new order of Social life, in which men might live as 
Brethren, working for the common good. They failed, 
but then the whole of Christianity is one long record of 
failure, it will never succeed until we all are one in Him. 
All Life is a failure, a reaching beyond what we can grasp, 
an attempt to achieve the apparently impossible—a 
Birth, a Crucifixion, but a Resurrection, and an Ascension. 

They may have failed but apparently whenever Christ 
touches men they are stirred to try again. This dream 
of a new and better social order is as much an essential 
part of the Christian Life as prayer, and communion with 
God. Like them it has had its ups and downs. It 
has been crucified with the life of prayer, all down the 
ages, but it has risen again to challenge the world, and set 
men striving after better things. Men cannot meet with 
Christ in prayer, and remain content to shut Him out 
of the places where they earn their bread, and live their 
common life. The Christian life of devotion and the 
Christian ideal of community life are inextricably bound 
up with one another, and stand or fall together. 

Right at the heart of the Christian Devotional Life 
there has always been the Breaking of Bread, and when 
that Sacrament is divorced from the dream of a Christian 
Social order, it is deprived of its true significance. If we 
cut off that Bread which is His Body from all connection 
with our daily bread, and the means whereby we earn it; 
if we declare that He is present in the Bread of the Sanctu- 
ary, but absent from the bread of the street—we deny the 
Truth of the Incarnation. We deny that “ The WORD 


66 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


became Flesh—through Whom, all things were made, 
and without Whom nothing was made that was made.” 
The Christian Faith demands that we acknowledge a real 
presence of Christ in the Bread upon the Altar before 
it is broken and consecrated. We cannot deny that 
presence without denying that Christ is the Word of God 
through Whom the worlds were made, and in Whom they 
find their meaning. 

It is this presence of Christ in common bread and His 
concern. with the way we earn it that the world denies 
emphatically. They are quite willing, the men of the 
world, to allow that we may find Him, by an act of faith, 
in that Bread upon the altar, so long as we do not drag 
Him in to the bread of the common street. No body 
worries about Christ so long as He can be kept shut up 
in Churches, He is quite safe there, but there is always 
trouble if you try to let Him out. 

The late Bishop of Zanzibar told a great body of 
Christians that they must “ fight for their tabernacles.” If 
that means, as on his lips it did, that we must stand firm for 
the Truth that the tabernacle of God is with men; if it means 
that the gates of the little shrine, where men and women 
come to worship the Christ, are set open wide that He may 
go out to seek and to save, it is well ; but if it means that we 
confine Him, and seek Him only there among the lilies, 
it is a dangerous deceit indeed. To confine Christ is to 
crucify Him. Christ can be crucified in Churches, and the 
clouds of incense may but serve to hide the sorrow in His 
eyes. 

The first necessity of the Christian Faith is to accept 
Christ as the meaning of all things, and to see all things 
only as they are seen in Him. In Him is life, all life, 
even the life of common bread. Through Him were all 
those powers given by which men earn and eat to-day. 
Through Him were made the monster ships by which the 
grain is brought to us, through raging storms across three 
thousand miles of sea. The loaf we break, the wafer that 
we consecrate, was born, may be, in the golden miles of 
Canada, America, or the Argentine, and is gathered for 
us from the ends of the earth, for all the world is one in 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 67 


bread. If it were not for that new world-wide unity 
in bread, millions who live to-day would have to die, they 
‘could not keep themselves. It is a due development of 
man. It was the sowing and reaping of a harvest that 
first turned the nomad hunter, who ranged the forest for 
his food, like a lion slaying for his cubs, into the settled 
social tiller of the soil. There never was a harvest until 
men learned in some measure to work as one. Bread has 
always been an artificial thing, and is now as artificial as 
Quaker oats. The throb of the screws, the flames of the 
blast furnace, the gloom and darkness of the mine, are all 
in our daily bread. As it lies there upon the altar it is 
the oblation of our whole intricate and manysided life, 
the sweat, and the blood, and the brain of man are in it, 
men for whom Christ died. The lives of toiling millions 
go to make the pure white wafer or the little piece of 
Bread we hold up before the Lord before the Consecration 
act, and therefore Christ is in it, or more accurately it is 
in Christ, and has no meaning apart from Him. The 
whole of our Social Order 1s in the Bread of the Altar which 
watts the act of the Christian community who lift it up to God. 

We cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that it is the 
Christian Community that consecrates, it is a corporate 
act, in which every member of the Church takes part. 
It is not consecrated bv the priest for the people of God, 
but by the people, the Church which is His Body, through 
the Priest the Church ordains. It is a corporate act, 
and that is its very essence. Here then is the Christian 
community seeking by God’s grace to consecrate the Social 
Order of common life, that it may become the Sacrament 
of His Presence among men. 

What then is the Relation between the presence of 
Christ in common bread, which the doctrine of the 
Incarnation compels us to acknowledge, and that Presence 
which our Christian experience compels us to call, with 
reverence and gratitude, The Real Presence of the Lord 
in the Sacrament ? 

The Presence of Christ in the Bread, and in the 
present Social Order which is the meaning of the Bread, 
is the presence of the Crucified. Can we doubt that? 


68 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


There never was a time when there was not sin and 
sorrow in Bread,* and there is sin and sorrow in it now— 
such sin and such sorrow, the sin of slums and the 
sorrow of the darkened lives that cry for light from the 
underworld. All sorrow is His sorrow, and, mystery of 
mysteries, all sin is His sin, who was made sin for us. 
When, therefore, the Christian community, through its 
own appointed Priest, holds up the Bread, they hold up 
the Crucified Lord. They shew forth His death till He 
come. They identify themselves with Him in His age long 
agony of Redemption, and confess with sorrow their part 
in the sin that mars the winning of our Daily Bread. The 
lust of power, the faithless fear, the hatred, and the bestial 
greed which break the world wide unity of Bread, and make 
what God wills to be a beautiful and balanced order into a 
cruel, ugly chaos. 

No man can eat alone. The very act of eating brings 
us into touch with our brothers and with Him. He seeks, 
it is His eternal nature to seek us in the breaking of all 
Bread. But the shame of our common life is that weeat 
and drink not discerning the Lord’s Body. We snatch 
at His gifts like lower animals, seeing only with sensual 
sight, seeing in the Bread we eat neither the Brethren 
nor the Christ, but ourselves, and our own lust of life. 
Thus it is that we eat and drink damnation to our souls, 
and the Bread of Blessing is turned into a curse. There 
is the snarl as of dogs in our cities, and the cry of the child 
in our streets. He seeks us in the common bread, but 
cannot find us. He could not cease to seek us. If for 
one millionth part of a second His everlasting search 
should cease, the stars would fall upon us, and the hills 
would crumble into dust. For the Life of the Universe 
is the Love of God. It needs no Church nor Sacrament 
to secure God’s Love for us, or to make it certain that the 
Eternal Shepherd will come seeking His sheep. That is 
His Nature, and He could not be false to Himself. 


* cf. S. James Epistle, Chap. v. 4.—Behold the hire of the labourers 
who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by 
fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered 
into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 69 


That is the central Truth of the New Testament Revela- 
tion. God is not the Eastern Monarch on His Throne 
waiting for the world to come to Him, He is an ever active 
Spirit of Eternally living Love, seeking to Create and to 
Redeem. God seeks, but before we can be found of Him, 
there must be from us response. However faint and poor 
it be, yet there must be some answer to His call. While 
we are yet a great way off—He runs—but we must first 
have said, “I will arise and go.” The sin that turns 
the blessing of our Daily Bread, and the means whereby 
we earn it, into a curse, is that we earn and eat it without 
a thought of Him. As we have seen, He is seeking us 
through this New Environment which He has created, 
the world wide economic unity, which He has made to 
be the body of the Brotherhood of man, but we do not 
answer, we see nothing in it but increased power to gratify 
our lusts, and so the Body is broken, wounded, torn, it 
bleeds on battlefields, is diseased in slums, it is covered 
with festering sores of vulgar luxury, it groans with 
hunger, and is rent by strife. 

This is His Body, in more than a symbolic sense, and it 
is in the common bread of the oblation before the con- 
secration act. We make too little of the offertory, it is not 
understood. Money has degraded it, and it has become the 
collection to pay the verger to stoke the furnace and keep 
our feet warm while we pray. But in truth we ought to offer 
up our money too, remembering that money is human 
flesh and blood, a measure of human energy, physical, 
mental, and moral in the last analysis. It is not an evil 
or a sordid thing in itself. There is no greater blessing, 
nor anything more beautiful than a sound and _ stable 
monetary system. The complex network of our 
modern finance ought to be the healthy nervous system 
of the Body of Mankind. Contempt of and misuse of 
money is contempt of and misuse of man, and there- 
fore of God. The sordidness of money is in ourselves, 
and the kind of shame we have about itis a sign of something 
wrong deep down within our private_and our public life. 
We always come down to money, we do not lift it up. 
That is why our very charity has become a curse, a sop to 


70 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


our uneasy consciences, a means whereby we protect 
ourselves from pain. The offertory has become a joke, 
and the joke is the sign of the nasty trivial nature of our 
social life. We snigger about our offering, as I doubt 
not the Jews that pressed about Him sniggered at the 
Christ. The perfunctory offering of alms that cost us 
nothing is a sign of the divorce of the Sacrament from 
the daily life. It is time we ended that. The alms and 
the oblations are one—two sides of one thing—which is 
the Body of the Lord. God is seeking us through money, 
its power ought to be the power of His Love, and never 
until it is to us the Sacrament of our unity in Him, can 
the world find Peace. The misuse of money is the deepest 
root of War. 

In our common life Christ seeks us through Bread and 
Money, which is another form of Bread, and men do not 
respond, and therefore He is crucified afresh. But in the 
Sacrament we do respond. The Christian community 
meets to break the Bread and offer alms in memory 
and for Love of Him. They are met to plead His 
Sacrifice, and to identify themselves with His suffering 
in and for the world. They join in a Confession 
of our common sin, their part in it, and their sorrow 
for it. That is the meaning of the General Confession. 
Men have got it all mixed up with their private confessions, 
and, having but a feeble sense of their own sinfulness, 
have thought that the solemn words “ the burden of them 
is intolerable ’’ ought to be cut out, because they could 
not say them with sincerity. But it is not the fact that 
you lied or evil lusted last week that is intolerable, though 
it ought to be, it is the procession of prostitutes, the 
squalor of Bethnal Green, the anguish of children and the 
torture of women, it is the sin of the world that is intoler- 
able. If you have not begun to feel that, you have not 
begun to know Him. 

Is it not intolerable ? O, God in heaven, if you do not 
know it—go and see. If you still think life is as tidy 
and neat as your Sunday altar, looking so nice with its 
lilies and cross, go and see—you must know the tragedy 
of the altar before you find its Peace. The man whose 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 71 


eyes God has opened sees Christ crucified in the world, 
and enters into the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming 
a sin-bearer for His sake. 

That is what it means to be a member of a Church. 
‘JT fill up in my body what is lacking of the sufferings of 
Christ for His body’s sake, which is the Church’ (Col. i, 24). 
This is at once the joy and sorrow of the Christian life. 


Gladness be with thee helper of the World, 
Methinks this is the authentic sign and seal 

Of Godship that it ever waxes glad, 

And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts 
Into a rage to suffer for mankind 

And recommence at sorrow. 


Whenever the Church has been alive with His life it has 
felt this burden of the world’s sin, and this is the very 
Sacrament of sin bearing, in which the Brethren 
acknowledge their part in the world sin, and identify 
themselves with the suffering of the world’s Saviour. 
In it they take the common bread in which they perceive 
the presence of the Crucified and lift it up, lft it up by a 
corporate act of honest Love, seeking in it not themselves, 
but Him, not their will but His Will, not their gain but 
His glory. And because they lift it up, and every time tt is 
so lifted up, He can and does take tt and use tt, as He can 
use no other Bread, use it to become in fact His Body, 
the instrument of a Presence which is a real Presence in a 
unique and special sense, because it is the Presence of the 
Christ not merely Born and Crucified as He is in all the 
world, but Risen and Ascended too—the Presence of the 
Christ with Power. That is why this corporate act, whereby 
the Bread is lifted up, has ever been the sum and centre of 
the Christian worship, in which they have always found 
and find the meaning of their lives. In it they pledge 
themselves, and are endowed with power, to go out and 
suffer with Him, bearing in Love and striving in prayer 
against the sin of the world, that men may be led to lift 
up all bread, and all the means whereby they earn : 
seeking in them not themselves but Him, seeking first 


72 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness that all things 
may be added to them, that so they may eat and drink 
salvation to their souls and bodies, and, living with eyes 
unveiled, in a Sacramental universe, may everywhere 
discern the Body of the Lord. 

But where worship is divorced from work, and God’s 
Presence in the Sanctuary from His presence in the street, 
we run the deadly danger of localizing God, and our 
Sacraments may be turned into sin. If the Sacrament 
is to take its proper place as the central act of Christian 
Worship, Christian men must learn to see in it the whole 
purpose and meaning of their daily work, and that means 
that the whole multitude of gifts and powers whereby we 
earn and eat must be lifted up from the level of use for 
private profit to the level of use for the Glory of God. 
Until that is done the Church must continue to suffer 
and to strive, bearing the sin of the world, she must 
continue ‘‘ to show forth the Lord’s Death, till He come,” 
come with the Power of the Risen and Ascended Christ 
to all men, as He comes to the faithful soul who eats His 
Body and drinks His Blood.” 

We must not interpret the sacred words “ The Body of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve 
Thy Body and Soul unto Everlasting Life” as though 
Everlasting Life only began beyond the grave, and in the 
world to come.” It begins here and now. It is the true 
community of life of Love, without which whosoever 
liveth is counted dead before Him, and which it is our 
duty to manifest in our bodies and our souls for the saving 
of mankind. 

He that hath the Son hath—not shall have but hath— 
everlasting life, and that life must progressively permeate 
and be expressed in every activity of man, until the 
Kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our 
God and of His Christ. Thus in the Blessed Sacrament 
is summed and centred the Power, the meaning, and the 
purpose of our Christian life. Through it we enter into the 
Fellowship of His sufferings that we may rise and ascend 
with Him in work that is worship, and worship that is our 
a glorious work, living our lives in praise and prayer, 
or: 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 73 


Peace does not mean the end of all our striving, 
Joy does not mean the drying of our tears, 
Peace is the power that comes to souls arriving 
Up to the light where God Himself appears. 


Joy is the wine that God is ever pouring, 
Into the hearts of those that strive with Him, 
Opening their eyes to vision and adoring, 
Strengthening their arms to warfare glad and grim. 


Bread of Thy Body give me for my fighting, 
Give me to drink Thy Sacred Blood for Wine, 
While there are wrongs that need me for the righting, 
While there is warfare splendid and divine. 


Give me for light the sunshine of Thy sorrow, 
Give me for shelter the shadow of Thy Cross, 
Give me to share the glory of to-morrow, 
And gone from my heart is the bitterness of loss. 


CHAPTER VII 
The Glory of the only Son sent from the Father.—S. JOHN . 14 


GLory is one of the great words which cannot be defined. It 
is not possible to say what it means. Not because it means 
too little but because it means too much. It is one of the 
words that are used at points where human speech fails, 
as an attempt to express the inexpressible. 

There are many such words in every language, and they 
have always been great powers in the world. Liberty, 
Justice, Honour, Equality, Progress, all have this in 
common that they defy definition. Libraries have been 
written to define them, but they remain like mountain 
peaks refusing to be climbed. The Truth is that they all 
penetrate beneath the reason and the intellect to that 
underworld of the human mind wherein the primitive 
passionate forces of life, the impulses and instincts, exercise 
their vital power for good or ill. It is for this reason 
that they are great fighting words. Whenever men are 
called to battle they are used like drums and trumpets 
to sound the challenge and stir the blood of men to war. 
They are the words for which men slay and suffer death. 
That is why the reckless use of them is mortal sin. They 
are not words which should be used without a solemn 
sense of responsibility. The man who plays with them is 
playing with what Dr. William McDougall calls, “ the 
central mystery of life and mind and will.” 

They are the religious words in the strict sense, that is, 
words which either drive men mad or raise them to the 


74 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 75 


highest sanity, or, if the soul be dead or sleeping, elicit no 
response at all, and have no meaning. In periods when the 
primitive passions of men are roused and they are living 
fiercely, the great words are wantonly misused, as they 
have been in the last ten years. They have been scattered 
broadcast to gratify the passion of the panic-stricken mob, 
thrown like pearls before swine. The result of this has been 
what our Lord foresaw, familiarity breeds contempt, and 
the great words have become suspected and despised. 
The world to-day is weary of them, and scents insincerity 
whenever they are used, and not without reason. The 
speech of the politician and the demagogue is often as 
bitter as brine to the soul athirst for Truth, nor is that 
bitterness of empty speech always absent from the pulpit, 
which may account for the antagonism or indifference 
of the pew. Great words tempt the speaker, that is why 
he needs to say his prayers, and glory is one of them. 
There is a false glory that is not His. We went to war 
for glory and found no glory in war, and thousands to-day 
will tell you that there is no glory in life at all. They 
are disillusioned and disappointed, the fires of life are 
burning low. But that will not last, it is a phase that 
must pass and is already passing. Man does not die, 
and he must either find some glory in life or perish self- 
destroyed. 

You Christians are always singing hymns, a man said 
to me the other day, I suppose they are all about heaven 
for I do not see anything on earth to sing hymns about. 
He was not properly alive, you could see he was not. 
He was killed in June, 1917, when his son was shattered 
by a shell near Ypres. There were many casualties that 
never appeared in the lists. But men cannot live for long 
without something to sing about, something to praise in 
poetry, to celebrate in colour, or to bow their knees and 
worship in the silence of pure joy. They must have glory, 
for glory is what sets a man singing, dancing, painting, 
praying, writing poetry, pouring himself out in joyous 
sacrifice, or makes him bow his head in dumb and wonder- 
ing awe. The permanent danger of mankind is not no 
glory, but false glories. The Bible—which is the book of 


76 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


human life, the only completely human book because it 
goes not only down into hell, but up into heaven, meets 
man’s sin with God’s Redemption, contains both Judas 
and Jesus, the almost less than human with the humanly 
divine,—the Bible is full of glories. 

Everything that has ever made man’s heart beat faster, 
and stirred the blood within his veins is there, all the 
many sided glory of man’s life on the earth. Glory of 
riches, glory of power, glory of glittering thrones, great 
temples, towering mountains and tall trees. Glory of 
sun and moon and stars, the glory of a woman’s hair, 
glory of white lilies and pure saints, glory of gallant horses 
and great beasts, glory of youth and glory of age, glory 
of morning, glory of eve, glory of cities, nations, empires, 
armies, kings, all the thrill and throb of passionate life, 
the Bible knows it all. But there is no cry that it contains 
so full of exaltation, trembling reverence, triumphant 
certainty and joy unbounded as this, “‘ We beheld His 
glory, glory as of the only Son sent from the Father’s side,” 
or the cry of S. Paul, ““God who commanded the light to 
shine out of the darkness hath shined into our hearts to 
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the 
Face of Jesus Christ.” 

And in a thousand different forms, in passionate poetry, 
majestic music, in a blaze of perfect colour, in mysteries 
of arch and aisle, in splendour of white steeples, and 
strength of massive towers, the cry has been echoed down 
the ages—thine is the glory for ever and ever, Amen. It isin 
Bach’s Mass in B Minor. It is in the spire of Salisbury 
and the towers of York. Words fail me. What more 
can I say. Just the steady, sober Truth of my own soul 
lost in the dark without Him: 


Only in Him can I find home to hide me, 
Who on the Cross was slain to rise again. 

Only with Him my comrade God beside me 
Can I go forth to war with sin and pain. 


The glory of Jesus Christ—what is it? What picture 
was in S. John’s mind as he wrote. Was it the picture that 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 77 


he painted elsewhere, “‘ His head and his Hairs were white 
like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were as a flame 
of fire, and when I saw Him I fell at His feet as dead. 
And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, Fear not ; 
I am the first and the last.”” Or did His mind swing back 
to the mount of Transfiguration, to the Jesus Whose face 
did shine as the sun and Whose raiment was white as the 
light. If we are to judge by the story which follows, 
the Gospel according to S. John, it is to neither of these 
points that his mind turns, but to the hill outside the city, 
and to the central Cross, and the figure hanging serenely 
patient in His agony upon it. Even more than the others 
the fourth Gospel is dominated by, and finds its denouement 
in, the Passion. It is at the crowning point of the Passion 
that he breaks out again into a direct personal testimony. 
“ He that saw it bare record, and his record is true, and he 
knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.” “‘ But 
one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forth- 
with came there out Blood and Water,’ “and we beheld 
His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father—— 
full of grace and truth.”’ And this is borne out by the fact 
that in another place, when he is looking into the great 
distances as far as the eyes of inspired faith can see, when 
he is trying to express what he sees in the very heart of 
God, he cries, ‘““ And I beheld, and lo in the midst of the 
throne . . . stooda Lambas it had been slain ; 
and I heard the voice of many angels round about the 
throne, and the number of them was ten thousand times 
ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying in a 
loud voice, ‘‘ Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive 
power and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, 
and glory and blessing.’ ” The glory of all the great 
words finds its only meaning in the glory of the WORD 
who became Flesh—the Lamb that was slain from the 
foundation of the World. 

It was the Cross that was the glory centre of the Christ 
for St. John. It was through the Cross that the 
gates of the highest heaven were opened wide and 
he could see within, and in that heaven’s very heart 
he saw the Crucified. That is the central Truth of 


78 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


the Christian Faith, and the hardest Truth to bear. 
Men have never been able to stand it, they cannot stand 
it now—the deity of the Lamb. A helpless, harmless, 
unarmed God who bears no sword, and wields no force 
to drive men to His Will, has never seemed like God 
to men. He does not seem like God to-day. We are all 
in our hearts like Peter, and when God bares His very 
soul and shows the wounds, and sorrow there—the suffering 
of Perfect Love—we say, ‘This be far from Thee, Lord,” 
and we do it for the same reason as S. Peter—we make 
God in the image of man. ‘“ You are thinking not the 
thoughts of God, but the thoughts of men.” We think 
of the Christ in glory as different from the Christ who 
came in great humility. We give to Christ in Heaven 
what He would not have on earth, a monarch’s throne, 
a golden crown, and force to coerce and compel men to 
His Will. We cannot understand any king but Caesar, 
so we Caesarise the Christ. We cannot worship what 
we do not fear, and so we make Christ terrible as tyrants 
are, and clothe Him in the panoply of our earthly kings. Men 
have always done this. They made God in their own 
image, and so saw His glory as the glory of force, of power 
to dominate and compel. God was the supreme unlimited, 
untrammelled Egotist with omnipotent force to work 
His Will. He was what man the egotist would like to be— 
the absolute man in the street. The glory of absolute force 
has always thrilled men, and thrills them still. We love 
the strong, dominant, driving man, he is what we would 
like to be—and we naturally worship the Napoleon of 
eternity.* He can do what we would like to do, damn all 
our enemies to hell, and punish them as they deserve. 
We cannot slay the men who differ from us, so we imagine 
One who can and will. We are like the little maid of all 
work in the kitchen who dreams of Lady Ermyntrude and 

* That was the secret of the popular adoration of Lord Kitchener 
at the beginning of the War. He was pictured as the man of 
Power who swept obstacles out of his way with a wave of his hand. 
That strong face with the slight cast in the eyes summed up in 
itself all that we wanted to be. Therefore his name was a name 


to conjure with. He was the apotheosis of ourselves. God rest 
his soul. We laid a heavy burden on his back. 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 79 


the Duke of Abercrombie, with coronets, and strings of 
pearls. She leaves her sordid life on earth, and walks a 
stately duchess in a splendid drawing-roon, ordering her 
servants with calm and haughty certainty that they must 
obey. The God we naturally worship is an infinite exten- 
sion of ourselves—a God Who is what we would be if we 
could have our way—and so we make Him an absolute 
Monarch. 

We cannot believe that God is like Christ, so we 
make Christ like God to compensate. We are still mostly 
Greeks or Jews to whom the Cross is either foolishness 
or a stumbling block. We are a proud, independent, 
self-reliant people, and have never been happy with 
Christ crucified as revealing the glory of God. To us it 
would degrade God and demean His dignity to suppose 
that He was harmless, and could not hurt anyone physically. 
What we think is, “‘ Christ was meek and gentle once, just 
to give us a chance, but now He is gone up on high, and 
when He comes again it will be altogether different. He 
will come in glory, and of course that means with a sword 
and a host of heavily-armoured angels, and torments for 
the wicked in His hands.”’ So we interpret the passages 
that tell us of His coming, in power and great glory, as 
though His power and His glory could change their nature 
and from being the power of Love become the power of 
force and fear, and from being the glory of service and 
humility become the glory of domination and _ pride. 
Christ was Jesus once on earth but when He comes again 
He will be like God, a super-super-Napoleon. Thus we 
do not see the glory of Christ, but give Him a glory of our 
own. 

We do this inevitably until we really see Him. Then 
we realize that it is not Christ that changes His glory 
but we that must change ours. It is not He that assumes 
the glory of force but we that must progressively perceive 
the glory of Reason and of Love. He is the same yesterday, 
to-day, for ever, there never has been, and there never 
can be, any change in Him, but we must change until 
we cease to fear force, admire despots, and grovel in 
abject worship before the tyranny of massed armies and 


80 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


organized mobs, and learn to worship the Love, the pure 
and peaceable wisdom, and the selfless humility of Christ— 
His glory as of the only Son, sent from the Father’s side. 
We are redeemed as we learn that the folly of God is wiser 
than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 
For the Word of the Cross is to those who are perishing— 
not living but striving to postpone death—pure folly— 
but to those who are on the road of life it is the Power of 
God. To those who are still living on the level of sensual 
sight or of the material intellect the way of Love and 
Reason is just madness (cp. Chap. iv), but to those who live 
on the level of spiritual vision, it is the only sanity. 

As, through evolution in time, the true nature of the 
world in which we live is progressively revealed to us, 
it becomes more and more evident that we can only live 
in it as we conform to the Christian standard and attain 
to the Christian Virtues (Chap. li). History is working 
itself out to a crisis, and the necessity of a choice between 
the glory of the Cross and the glory of the world, becomes 
more and more urgent. Through the vast complexities 
of our modern civilized world made one by God, the 
Crucified Christ is looking down upon us—with death in 
His bleeding hands and feet—but life in the light of His 
burning eyes—and demanding from us all—every individual 
man and woman—a choice between the glory of Reason, 
Patience, and Love, and the glory of Force, and Wrath 
and Fear. 

The European man whom the Dean of S. Paul’s 
describes as “the fiercest of the beasts of prey, who 
is not likely to abandon the weapons which have made 
him the lord and bully of the planet,” is threatened with 
extinction and disaster unless he either becomes a more 
tyrannous lord, and a more bestial bully, using without 
restraint or remorse the powers of destruction that have 
been put into his hands, or dies with Christ and finds a 
more excellent way. There are many modern thinkers 
who call upon us loudly to take the way of the world, 
and take it with vigour, to close our ranks against the 
common foe, which is the coloured races and the submerged 
masses of the world, to reassert our natural supremacy, 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 81 


brush aside all scruples, and boldly adopt a thorough-going 
policy of world-wide domination and repression. We still 
have the power to terrorize, and if necessary, exterminate 
the weaker brother from the world. “ Progress,” they say, 
“ depends upon the strong man, and the stron» peoples ; in 
God’s name, the old name of Jehovah, Lor 1 of Hosts, 
not this decadent new name of Jesus, Lord of Mercy, 
let them use their strength, before the brutal rabble of 
all lands rise up in their incurable and inevitable animal 
blindness, and destroy the culture that the exceptional 
men have laboriously produced by the exploitation of the 
foolish masses of mankind.” 

It is evident even to these men that the sands of time 
are running out, and that we must decide. What shall we 
do with the man Christ Jesus, put Him to death as a silly- 
dreaming fool, Who betrays and cannot save the world, 
or hail Him King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the only 
Ruler of peoples. We must do one or the other, unless 
we are to drift to our destruction. At present we are 
drifting. We are doing neither the one nor the other. 
We are putting our trust in force and fear, but not whole- 
heartedly. The strong man is asserting his rights but his 
hand trembles, and he is not sure. There are powers that 
hold him back. Force begets force, and dominatin 
breeds rebellion. What he calls the rabble of the world, 
at home and abroad, is massing itself to organized resistance. 
The European man lives in a house divided against itself, 
the weaker brother over here feels himself nearer to the 
weaker brother over there in the East, than he does to 
the strong of his own race. There is division at home, 
and the strength of the West is being dissipated in class 
and national antagonisms. From the Asiatic point of view 
there is a two-fold civil war in Europe, its own strong men 
are warring with the weak. Moreover the strong man 
is not what he was. That strange man on the Cross 
worries him, he is uncomfortable about Christ. Just 
when he is going to strike, a hand is laid on his arm, and 
even though he shakes it off and strikes, the blow has not 
his whole force behind it, it wounds but it does not kill. 
Christ is making cowards of us all. We dare not do wrong 


82 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


thoroughly. We are not as good murderers as we were. 
We have begun to apologize for our existence, and seek 
to justify ourselves. 

That is fatal. ‘It is really fatal. We cannot 
save the world by timid murder, and mild force. 
The prospect thatS’opens out before us when we con- 
template the full use of our powers, terrifies us. There are 
thousands who pray for a strong man who would not dare 
to follow him if he came. They worship Napoleon but 
are frightened of Christ. He hangs there on His cosmic 
Cross, terrible as an army with banners, because He bleeds, 
bleeds in the slums, and in the unemployed, bleeds in the 
little children crammed into the mills of India, China and 
Japan, bleeds in the subject races made into instruments 
of gain, bleeds in the memory of our “ glorious dead,” 
in Jack and Edward who went out to fight for Freedom, 
Honour and Peace, and are waiting for them still. We 
are like the Englishman in Bernard Shaw’s S. Joan, who 
was not saved by the sufferings of Christ until he saw 
them in the Agony of S. Joan, and then was not so much 
saved as shattered. 

Something has come over us all. We are not the 
men we were. But we will recover, the strong men 
say. It is only a passing phase. The good old times 
will come back again. It is only shell shock. This milk 
and water sentiment will die out, and we shall recover our 
nerves, take up the white man’s burden, and go out to 
rule and punish. I wonder. I wonder. I am frightened 
of Christ. I think those who rage and spit on Him, who 
declare defiantly that He is dead and done for, those 
who caricature and curse Him, as the terrified rulers of 
Russia, and the strong men here at home do, scorning the 
Sermon on the Mount as an impossible dream; I think 
their fear of Him, which is manifest in their defiance, is 
nearer the Truth than the indifference of those who think 
He does not matter. He is really dangerous. If He is 
not the Son of God, and the revelation of reality, He is a 
most pernicious impostor. It is really true that “ the 
white man with his genius for leadership and fighting is in 
danger of extinction.’’ He must either kill Christ or 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 83 


Christ will kill him with His glory of justice, reason, 
patience and peace. 

He looks as contemptible as ever with His ragged 
rabble of Church that shouts Hosanna on Sunday 
and runs from the Garden of Gethsemane on Friday, 
that protests like Peter and then betrays, that disputes 
who shall be greatest and thinks it is extravagant to wash 
men’s weary feet ; with His crowd of wretched parsons, 
poor human fools like me, who preach the Gospel and 
cannot live it, who try to be loving and are not even 
amiable. He is as ridiculous as ever, just the same Christ 
that sat with a dirty purple horse cloth on His bleeding 
back, and a crown of thorns set sideways on His head, 
with a mock sceptre in His hand, and the spittle of a 
drunken soldier rolling down His face, just the same 
Christ, but I am afraid of Him, as, in his heart of hearts, 
I believe the European Man, the fiercest of the beasts of 
prey, is frightened of Him. He is disturbing, unnerving, 
He saps self-confidence and murders pride. He makes 
men want to go down upon their knees, and no strong 
man should do that except to the Almighty. That, of 
course, is all right. All men must kneel before the 
Almighty—He is the force of all forces, the Tyrant of 
tyrants, Who can destroy all the worlds in a moment 
of time. Even the bully may bow to a bigger bully than 
himself and remain a bully still. 

But this Jesus unmans us. Just when we are going 
to assert our proper rights, and claim our own position, 
He comes and looks at us, and asks us awkward questions 
as to whether our rights are right, and whether we have 
any position. He is dangerous. He takes the fight out 
ofaman. I can hear the fiercest of beasts of prey pleading 
for mercy. “‘O Man upon the Cross don’t look like that, 
it hurts, let me live a little longer for myself, life is very 
pleasant, and even the milder lusts are good. I will be 
respectable and civilized, I will cover up my murders and 
decently disguise my robbery and theft; but go away, 
go away and leave me. I am only a sinful man, and my 
sins are very sweet. Why do You come and torment 
me. It is absurd asking me to kill myself like this. What 


84 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


have You got to give in exchange for my honest pride, 
my proper self-reliance and self-respect. I won’t listen 
orlook. You will ruin the world with those eyes, paralyzing 
the powers of law and order, and threatening commerce 
and trade. You cannot expect us to think about natives 
when we want land and raw materials, or to worry our- 
selves about men when we want to make money.” But 
He will not go away. I do not believe He will let us alone. 
He is making us waver all over the world. He even got 
into the Treaty of Versailles. He is going to drive us to a 
decision with His wounded hands. He will not let us have 
His world for a playground, a battlefield, a factory, or an 
Empire any longer, we must give it to Him. We must give 
tt to Him or—or there will be darkness over all the earth 
from the sixth hour until the ninth—and that may be a 
thousand years. We must decide, and this decision is 
for you and me. The history of the world is played out 
in the human soul, the individual human soul. The 
fate of the world, our children and our children’s children, 
depends on you and me. 

That is the meaning of this Lent. As He looks down 
upon you—with anxious wonder in His eyes—He sees the 
world in you. He thinks the world of every one of us. 
Are you going to try and keep the world fora playground— 
in which you have a good time, a battlefield on which 
you strive for your own personal ambitions, a factory to 
make wealth for you to spend, an Empire to satisfy your 
pride, or are you going to give it up to Him. Half measures 
are no good. Compromise without repentance and 
consecration will not save you or the world. It is 
the surest way to destruction. If all your Christ can 
do for you is to turn you into a caged beast, a respectable 
sinner, a half-hearted servant of the old red lusts, you 
cannot save your soul] alive, or save the world in which you 
live. It is a personal matter—yet not a purely personal 
matter. You live in a world and a world yet lives in you. 
For God’s sake do not think you do not matter, you are 
all that matters, for you are in all, and allisin you. Make 
up your mind—do yow believe in the glory of Christ— 
as of the only Son sent from the Father’s side? 


THE WORD AND THE WORK 85 


Is God Love and Reason, or is He brute force and self- 
assertion ? Is Christianity true or is it a tissue of dangerous 
sentimentality ? Can it save or will it ruin the world? 
It is manifestly dangerous. If it is not true, as a revelation 
of reality, it is likely to bring a curse upon the world. 
Christ is either divine or decadent. If He disarms and 
debrutalizes the western beast of prey, and makes him 
ashamed of his teeth and claws, and the world is in reality 
a jungle where brute force alone makes for survival, and 
self-assertion is the great necessity for life, then this Prince 
of Peace will be responsible for an orgy of bloodshed’ 
the like of which has never been. It is absurd to ignore 
Him. He ought either to be worshipped or crucified 
quickly before it is too late. If He cannot redeem man- 
kind, and make them reasonable then He will ruin them 
body and soul. The question of all questions is this. Do 
you believe that the way of reason, self-sacrifice, service 
and love is the way of life for you, and all mankind? 
Do you believe that in reality this world is not a battle- 
field for opposing armies, but a home for a family? Are 
you prepared to risk your life and your children’s lives, 
and to stake the honour of your country on that Faith ? 
Will you risk Good Friday to win an Easter Day ? 

Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief. I look upon 
the world and I see a Baby ona Mother’s Breast, a Body 
broken on a Cross, an Empty Tomb with a great stone 
rolled away, and One like unto the Son of Man with wounded 
hands outstretched to bless ascending in His Glory; 
and I believe that, right at the heart of the ultimate reality 
there was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world 
without end, a Person expressing a rational purpose which 
men can in some measure understand. I believe that this 
Person was, is, and ever shall be with God, and indeed is 
God, though it is nearer the Truth to say “ with God,” for 
“the Father is greater than He.”’ I believe that through 
this Person all things came into being, and that, apart from 
Him, not a single thing came into being which is of the 
nature of reality. In Him are the eternal sources of life, 
that life which from the darkness of mere sensation becomes 
light of intelligence in men, a light shining in darkness 


86 THE WORD AND THE WORK 


which cannot overcome it. I believe that this Person 
took upon Himself, and expressed Himself through, our 
human nature, and lived out a human life among men, 
and that they beheld, and can now behold, His glory which 
is the glory of the only perfect expression of Love, which 
is the ultimate and absolute reality of all things. 


Lord I believe ! 
Man is no little thing, 
That, like a bird in-Spring, 
Comes fluttering to the Light of Life, 
And out into the darkness of long death. 
The Breath 
Of God is in him, 
And his agelong strife 
With evil has a meaning and an end. 
Though twilight dim 
His vision be, 
Yet can he see 
Thy Truth. 
And in the cool of evening Thou, his friend, 
Dost walk 
With him, and talk 
(Did not the Word take Flesh ?) 
Of the great destiny, 
That waits him, and his race 
In days that are to be. 
By grace 
He can achieve great things, 
And, on the wings 
Of strong desire, 
Mount upward ever, higher and higher, 
Until above the clouds of earth he stands, 
And stares God in the Face. 
Amen and so be it. 


BRISTOL: BURLEIGH LTD., AT THE BURLEIGH PRESS 


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